AUSTRALIA
The Courier
CARDINAL George Pell has provided his full passport details in an extraordinary step to disprove allegations that have been made against him.
A former child victim of a paedophile Christian Brother has claimed that in 1969 Dr Pell, who was then a young priest, heard him pleading for help a few weeks after he had been raped.
The cardinal has this week given the Herald Sun access to a copy of his full passport showing his travel between the 1960s and 1970s. The passport makes it clear that Cardinal Pell was not in Australia in 1969. The Herald Sun reported on Monday that Paul Lyons, 55, had challenged the cardinal to prove he was not in Ballarat at the time he told priests at St Alipius Presbytery of his rape.
Mr Lyons, who has previously made the claims through his lawyer at a Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse, went public on the weekend saying: “I want Pell to produce the pages of his passport as proof that he was visiting Australia at the time.’’
The travel documents now prove that Dr Pell was studying in Oxford at the time Mr Lyons has said he was brutally raped, at age 9, in St Alipius Primary School by Christian Brother teacher Robert Best.
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