AUSTRALIA
NT News
BY MEGAN NEIL AND CHRISTOPHER TALBOT AAP NOVEMBER 25, 2015
GEORGE Pell hung up the phone when a former Catholic school principal asked him to publicly back the man’s attempts to deal with a bizarre pedophile priest, an inquiry has heard.
GRAEME Sleeman says he wrote to Cardinal Pell, then the Melbourne archbishop, about a decade after he resigned as principal of Doveton’s Holy Family Primary School in 1986 in frustration that nothing was done about parish priest Peter Searson.
Mr Sleeman was unable to get another job as principal of a Catholic school and said he wanted the Melbourne archdiocese to provide some support for his loyalty.
“I put my career on the line. I’d lost superannuation. I believed that I was a good educationalist and I was being deprived of carrying out my trade,” Mr Sleeman told the child abuse royal commission on Wednesday.
He said Cardinal Pell rang him to ask what he wanted.
Mr Sleeman told him: “I want you to go on national TV and the national press and state that the stance I took in Doveton was morally correct and the only one I could take.”
Then the archbishop ended the call.
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