Pell starts third day of abuse evidence

ROME
SBS

AAP

Cardinal George Pell has resumed giving his testimony to the child sex abuse commission sitting.

Watch the proceedings live by clicking here.

He arrived at the Hotel Quirinale in Rome earlier on Wednesday as plain-clothes state police officers kept journalists back.

Cardinal Pell is being questioned about what he knew of pedophile priests operating in Ballarat and Melbourne when he served there in the 1970s and 1980s.

On Tuesday, he told the commission he did not know about repeated complaints against the now-imprisoned pedophile Father Gerald Ridsdale because former Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns did not tell him.

The former senior Australian Catholic, now the third-most powerful man in the Vatican, shocked abuse survivors who are in Rome to watch him give evidence via video link, when he said on Tuesday Ridsdale’s offences were “a sad story” but had not been of much interest to him when they were happening in the 1970s in regional Victoria.

“I had no reason to turn my mind to the evils that Ridsdale had perpetrated,” the cardinal said from Hotel Quirinale, where he is giving his evidence.

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