AUSTRALIA
National Catholic Register
by John Power, Register Correspondent Wednesday, May 11, 2016
MELBOURNE, Australia — It’s Palm Sunday at St. Bede’s Church in Balwyn North, and parishioners have filled the pews to the brim for late-morning Mass. It’s an impressive attendance for a church in a sleepy eastern suburb of Australia’s second city, less than a third of which identifies as Catholic.
Yet times are difficult for the Melbourne Archdiocese, from which have emerged some of the most shocking revelations of child sex abuse and its cover-up within the Church in Australia.
That painful history has re-entered the public spotlight in recent weeks, as Catholics and nonbelievers alike have questioned the role of the former archbishop of Melbourne, Cardinal George Pell.
Cardinal Pell has become the focal point of scrutiny into the Church in Australia’s handling of abuse, with his recent testimony before a commission tasked with investigating institutional abuse. Survivors and media commentators have charged that the cardinal, who now manages the Holy See’s accounts in Rome as prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, must have known about priests targeting children but failed to act, something the cardinal has stringently denied.
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