AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Melissa Davey
@MelissaLDavey
Sunday 6 December 2015
The second part of public hearings into child sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy within Ballarat institutions begins in Melbourne on Monday, culminating in evidence from Australia’s most senior Catholic and the Vatican’s secretary for the economy in Rome, George Pell.
The first part of the hearings was heard in Ballarat in May, when the commission heard allegations that Pell tried to bribe a child sex abuse victim, David Ridsdale, to keep quiet about his molestation at the hands of his uncle and then priest, Gerald Francis Ridsdale.
Gerald Ridsdale committed more than 130 offences against children as young as four between the 1960s and 1980s, including while working as a school chaplain at St Alipius boys’ school in Ballarat, the royal commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse has previously heard. He is now in prison.
Pell, who supported Ridsdale during his first court appearance for child sex offences in 1993, has always denied knowing of any child abuse occurring in Ballarat while he worked there as a priest and with a clerical group called the College of Consultors during the 1970s and 1980s. Pell also spent time living with Gerald Ridsdale in 1973, but has said he had no idea he was a paedophile.
The commission has previously heard Pell was involved in a College of Consultors decision to move Risdale from the Mortlake parish in Ballarat to Sydney in 1982.
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