AUSTRALIA
The Tablet (UK)
16 May 2017 | by Mark Brolly
Pell’s Rome office has accused the book’s publisher of “interfering with the course of justice”
Cardinal George Pell’s Rome office says he will not seek to respond to allegations against him in a new biography released on Monday, “other than to restate that any allegations of child abuse made against him are completely false”.
Fairfax Media reported on 13 May that ‘Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell’, by Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Louise Milligan, contains allegations of abuse involving two choirboys at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in the late 1990s while then Archbishop Pell was Archbishop of Melbourne.
Fairfax, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age newspapers, said the book records the testimony of one alleged victim, a man now aged in his 30s, and the family of a second alleged victim, who died from a drug overdose in 2014. Soon after the alleged abuse took place, both boys asked to leave the choir, the book says.
The newspaper group also reported that the book contains new information about the child abuse cover-up within the Catholic Church in Australia, including allegations that Cardinal Pell – Prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy since 2014 and before that Archbishop of Melbourne from 1996-2001 and Archbishop of Sydney from 2001-14 – knew about paedophile priests earlier than he claimed.
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