UNITED STATES
Crux
By Sarah Kaplan
The Washington Post February 29, 2016
“I’m not here to defend the indefensible,” Cardinal George Pell told an Australian courtroom Sunday.
What he did was attempt to explain: how one of the most notorious pedophilia rings in the country could have taken place on his watch, how he could have heard about priests who engaged in “misbehavior” — kissing boys, swimming naked with students — and not reported it, how thousands of children were raped and molested by priests in Australia and elsewhere while the Church did nothing.
“The Church has made enormous mistakes and is working to remedy those,” he said via video conference from Rome. “But the Church in many places, certainly Australia, has mucked things up . . . has let people down.”
The investigation into the widespread sexual abuse of children in the city of Ballarat, where Pell was a priest, has brought allegations of exploitation and cover-up extraordinarily far up the Catholic Church’s chain of command; Pell is the Church’s secretary for the economy, a position described as the second most powerful in Rome, and he spoke from a hotel that was just blocks from the Vatican.
The hearings before Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse also come at a time when the Catholic Church’s handling of child abuse is more generally under scrutiny. The film “Spotlight,” which depicts the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into serially abusive priests, won the Oscar for best picture just hours after Pell concluded his testimony.
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