AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 24 December 2015)
Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission has learned how George Pell recruited supporters from among suburban priests when he began his rise to power in Melbourne in the 1980s and 1990s. Broken Rites understands that Pell was welcomed particularly by conservative (as distinct from moderate-minded) priests. One of these traditionalist supporters, Father John Thomas Walshe, has given evidence to the Royal Commission on behalf of Cardinal Pell’s lawyers. This Broken Rites article is an analysis of Walshe’s evidence. Father Walshe said he supports the policy of compulsory “celibacy” for Catholic priests. A week after his evidence, it was revealed that the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese has apologised to a former student who says he was sexually abused (at the age of 18) by Father Walshe.
The matter of the 18-year-old student is reported towards the end of this article but, first, here is an analysis (by Broken Rites) of Father Walshe’s evidence (on 15-16 December 2015) from the official transcript.
Cardinal George Pell received several mentions in Father Walshe’s evidence. Originally a priest in the Ballarat diocese (which covered the western half of Victoria), George Pell moved to Melbourne in 1985 to become the head of the Melbourne seminary (Corpus Christi College, then based at Melbourne’s Clayton), which trained priests for Victoria and Tasmania. In 1987 he was appointed as one of Melbourne’s four regional auxiliary bishops under the authority of Archbishop Frank Little (Bishop Pell’s region was Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs). This is when he became acquainted with allies such as Father John Walshe.
At this stage, Pell was no more famous nationally than any of Australia’s forty or so other Catholic bishops. But he was working on it.
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