AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher
Australia’s famous Cardinal George Pell has acknowledged that his early career was helped by a generous mentor — the late Bishop James Patrick O’Collins. Research by Broken Rites has shown that Bishop O’Collins also helped certain other priests — for example, the child-abuse criminal Father Gerald Ridsdale. Pell and Ridsdale eventually became two of the most widely publicised Catholics in Australia. Appropriately, a photograph of Ridsdale and Pell appears in the right-hand column on every page of the Broken Rites website.
When young George Pell and Gerald Ridsdale were growing up in the city of Ballarat, Bishop James O’Collins was in charge of the Catholic Church’s Ballarat diocese which extends throughout the western half of the state of Victoria. Pell and Ridsdale were recruited (separately) into the priesthood during Bishop O’Collins’s reign.
The rise of George Pell
George Pell was born in the city of Ballarat in the state of Victoria in 1941 (seven years younger than Gerald Ridsdale). In that same year, James O’Collins became the new bishop of the Ballarat Catholic diocese.
Although he never became an archbishop, O’Collins was certainly one of Australia’s most influential Catholic leaders.
O’Collins was a strong supporter of the conservative Catholic layman B.A. Santamaria, who operated a political organisation in Australia called “The Movement”. O’Collins was a member of a committee of three bishops who were appointed by the national organisation of bishops to liaise with “Bob” Santamaria on behalf of the church hierarchy.
George Pell did his secondary education at St Patrick’s Christian Brothers College in Ballarat, finishing in the late 1950s. He was then sponsored by Bishop O’Collins’s diocese to enter the Corpus Christi seminary in Melbourne to train as a priest to serve in the Ballarat diocese.
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