Abuse royal commission: Cardinal George Pell set to testify from Rome

AUSTRALIA/ROME
Sydney Morning Herald

Cardinal George Pell is likely to be grilled on when he first learned of child sexual abuse allegations against Catholic clergy when he fronts the sex abuse royal commission this week.

Cardinal Pell, one of the church’s strongest defenders against public criticism over its handling of the abuse scandal, will be cross-examined by commissioners for the first time on Monday about his early career as a priest in Ballarat and later as auxiliary bishop in Melbourne.

He has previously been questioned on this period by MPs at a Victorian parliamentary inquiry. Cardinal Pell has always denied having known children were abused in Ballarat when he was there.

Yet since he last testified to the royal commission in 2014 about establishing the church’s internal compensation scheme, the Melbourne Response, it has uncovered mounting evidence the opposite was true.

This will be the first time the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has questioned Cardinal Pell on evidence from survivors and the Ballarat diocese that he may have been aware of abuse and its cover-up at a number of Ballarat schools in the 1970s.

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