ROME
Telegraph (UK)
By AFP
Vatican finance chief Cardinal George Pell said that it was a “disastrous coincidence” that five paedophile priests preyed on children in the Australian town where he was based, as survivors accused him of lying.
On Thursday Cardinal Pell gave evidence for a fourth and final day to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney via videolink from Rome and came under intense questioning from lawyers representing victims of abuse by the clergy.
The cardinal has consistently denied any wrongdoing during his time in the town of Ballarat and the city of Melbourne where he grew up and worked in the 1970s and 1980s. During the same years paedophile priests abused dozens of children.
Cardinal Pell, who revealed Pope Francis had been given a summary of each day’s evidence, has claimed at least two archbishops and other people in authority deceived him by not revealing what was happening during a period of what he called “crimes and cover-ups”.
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