AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail
AAP
A clergy abuse victim who claims Cardinal George Pell tried to bribe him to keep quiet says the Catholic Church’s response was almost as painful as the abuse itself.
More victims will give evidence to the child sex abuse royal commission on Thursday, a day after its chair made it clear Cardinal Pell will have to answer allegations he knew about abuse by clergy in the Ballarat diocese.
David Ridsdale said he told Cardinal Pell, now the Vatican’s finance chief, in 1993 about the abuse at the hands of his uncle and pedophile priest Gerald Francis Ridsdale.
Mr Ridsdale told the commission Cardinal Pell asked him: “I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet.”
The former Sydney and Melbourne archbishop has been mentioned at the commission this week by several witnesses who say he knew – or at the least suggest he might have known – about the widespread abuse in Ballarat while he was a senior priest in the city in the 1970s.
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