AUSTRALIA
The Age

March 7, 2016

Phil Cleary

Church leaders were not doing anything that unusual when they covered for Ridsdale and his ilk.

Was anyone not moved to despair, or maybe even outrage, watching Cardinal George Pell’s evidence at the royal commission on child sexual abuse? Even if Pell didn’t know, as implausible as it looks, that Father Gerald Ridsdale and a cabal of priests and brothers was systematically raping children in the 1970s and ’80s, his church’s guilt is palpable.

Why was Pell, a big strong outspoken man in his younger years, so timid when a generation of children was being terrorised by cowardly, sadistic brothers and priests? If he’d been a reserved, retiring kind of man we might have imagined he didn’t have the nerve to confront those who covered for Ridsdale and his like. But Pell is not that kind of man. He’s never flinched…