AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times
New allegations of alleged conspiracies, cover-ups and broken lives have emerged, with questions about what Pell knew about paedophilia in the Catholic Church before he become Archbishop of Melbourne.
Louise Milligan
When the Most Reverend George Pell was still Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, he had the passing acquaintance of a priest in his region called Father Noel Brady. Brady is now parish priest at Resurrection Kings Park, a thriving western suburbs community where he ministers to a distinctly multicultural group of worshippers. He is an understated man and he blanches from any colourful descriptors of Pell or indeed of Pell’s motives. Brady says he prefers to stick to the facts. And the facts he alleges fly in the face of everything Pell now says about what he knew about paedophilia and how he handled it in the Catholic Church before becoming Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996.
Brady was ordained a priest in 1992 and his first parish, where he worked as assistant priest, was St Mary’s, Dandenong, in Melbourne’s outer south-east. Dandenong was in the southern region for which Pell was responsible for ministering as auxiliary bishop. Brady was appointed to St Mary’s on July 8, 1992, and that date is significant, he tells me. About four months after Brady arrived at the parish, he says a young couple who were parishioners came to see him after Mass.
They were extremely concerned about the husband’s brother, who lived a bit further out in Narre Warren. The young man was a victim of Father Kevin O’Donnell and Brady went to see him. “I will never forget walking around the property with [him] and the telling of his story reducing us both to tears,” Brady later wrote.
O’Donnell was by then a retired priest who was still living in a house on Church property in Dandenong. “It was awkward to say the least,” says Brady of the living arrangement – particularly since O’Donnell was good friends with Brady’s superior, the parish priest. In a 1989 confirmation ceremony video at Sacred Heart in south-west Melbourne’s Oakleigh, where O’Donnell was ministering at the time, Pell praised O’Donnell and another priest “for all the work they are doing here”.
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