AUSTRALIA
Catholic Voice
June 5, 2020
By Denis O’Brien
The recent release of the unredacted reports of the Royal Commission concerning the archdiocese of Melbourne and church authorities in Ballarat enables an assessment to be made of the behaviour of Cardinal Pell who as a younger man served in the church hierarchy in both places. Does the Commission’s narrative provide a basis for levelling against him the kind of criticism that has rightly been made of other church leaders who failed to deal appropriately with child sexual abusers? I suggest it does not.
The Ballarat report is mainly concerned with the response of church authorities to abuse perpetrated at Christian Brother schools in the diocese and to abuse perpetrated by certain priests of the diocese. The report discusses Pell’s involvement with Christian Brother offenders, Fitzgerald and Dowlan. Complaints were made about Fitzgerald when Pell was an assistant priest at Ballarat East in 1973. The main complaints concerned Fitzgerald taking grade 3 boys to an annual camp where they swam naked and his practice of kissing boys as they left school for the day. Pell heard about this behaviour. However, the Royal Commission accepted his evidence that he had no jurisdiction over the Christian Brothers. It also concluded that “it was not unreasonable for Father Pell, as a diocesan priest, to believe it was not for him to raise the conduct of Brother Fitzgerald with the provincial”.
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