ROME
news.com.au
Cardinal George Pell says the Catholic Church leadership failed to protect children in a Victorian diocese but he accepts no responsibility for moving a pedophile priest.
Cardinal Pell said it was improper to assign responsibility to those like himself who were ignorant of the offending by priest Gerald Francis Ridsdale in the Diocese of Ballarat in the 1970s and 1980s.
“In the diocese of Ballarat certainly there was a gigantic failure of leadership,” Cardinal Pell told the child abuse royal commission from Rome.
Cardinal Pell, who was an adviser to the Ballarat bishop Ronald Mulkearns between 1977 and 1984, did not agree the church collectively failed to protect children in the diocese during the 1970s and 1980s.
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