ROME
9 News

AAP

Australian child sex abuse survivors danced “as if they won the Oscar” in a Rome hotel when a movie about exposing pedophile priests won best film at the Academy Awards.

But the survivors’ group who travelled to Rome to hear Cardinal George Pell give evidence by videolink to the child abuse royal commission sitting in Sydney were brought back down to earth on Tuesday by his testimony of denial and sheeting home blame to others.

The previous day they had detected a conciliatory tone in the cleric’s evidence, noting he had backed off blanket denials that he knew nothing of pedophile priests offending in the Ballarat diocese and Melbourne when he served there in the 1970s and 1980s.

After that day of evidence, members of the survivors’ group left the plush Quirinale Hotel where the cardinal’s evidence is being heard and went on to watch…