AUSTRALIA
International Business Times
By Vittorio Hernandez | October 12, 2012
Sydney Archbishop George Pell denied on Thursday a claim by the lawyer representing a sex abuse victim that he was present when the boy, then a Grade 3 student, recounted his rape by a Christian Brother.
Mr Pell said the account by Melbourne lawyer Vivian Waller are “irresponsible, untrue and are absolutely denied.” In her submission to a Parliamentary investigation, Ms Waller alleged that the clergy refused to talk to the boy, a student of St. Alipius School, when he told another priest of the sexual abuse he suffered under the hands of the schools’s former principal and teacher, Brother Robert Best
The incident happened in 1969 and that year Mr Pell said he was not yet assigned to Ballarat where the school is. He was appointed to the Sydney diocese in 1973, the cardinal pointed out.
Mr Pell explained he was studying in Oxford in 1969 but returned to Australia in 1971 when he worked at Swan Hill in the Diocese of Ballarat. He was ordained in 1966 and received his second appointment as a priest in East Ballarat in 1973, according to the statement of the cardinal.
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