Andrew Bolt: If Pell knew, why not Paul?
The royal commission and the media agreed journalist Paul Bongiorno knew nothing of paedophile priests’ historic child sex abuse, so the question should be asked why they won’t also believe Cardinal George Pell, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Of all the journalists jeering that Cardinal George Pell “knew” all along about paedophile priests, one particularly makes me sick.
It’s Paul Bongiorno, himself a former priest who once lived with the worst paedophile priest.
Bongiorno should know better than to crow that the royal commission into child sex abuse last week said Pell knew for 40 years that priests were abusing children but did nothing.
Instead, he tweeted a link to a fellow Leftist gloating that Pell “could have protected children from abuse. He didn’t.”
Before I tell you exactly why Bongiorno — Channel 10’s former political editor and a long-time ABC commentator — should know this finding is a joke, here’s the background.
Suppressed sections of the royal commission’s final report were last week released after the High Court ruled Pell had been falsely convicted of raping two teenagers at once in an open room of his Cathedral.
But the royal commission’s own findings, reached at the height of the anti-Pell hysteria, are almost as far-fetched.
Pell insists that when he was a priest in Ballarat he never knew his boss, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, was hiding a vile paedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale.
Pell told the royal commission Mulkearns never told him and his other advisers, or “consulters”, that Ridsdale was a paedophile, and that this was why Mulkearns was moving him from parish to parish.
The royal commission essentially called Pell a liar: “Cardinal Pell’s evidence that ‘pedophilia was not mentioned’ (at a 1982 meeting) and that the ‘true’ reason was not given is not accepted.
“It is implausible ... that Bishop Mulkearns did not inform those at the meeting of at least complaints of sexual abuse of children.”
This is bizarre.
First, there was nothing to contradict Pell’s sworn evidence. Mulkearns himself said he’d said nothing, and Pell’s fellow consulters agreed they’d been kept in the dark.
And is it really likely that Mulkearns would confess to his juniors, especially rising star Pell, that he was protecting a priest who kept raping children?
But I get that Pell’s claims of ignorance jar. How could Ridsdale abuse at least 65 children over some 30 years without Pell knowing?
But the question is actually much broader, and Bongiorno is exactly the person to answer it.
It’s this: how could Ridsdale abuse at least 65 children over 30 years without being exposed or stopped by parents, police, journalists, welfare groups and prominent citizens, let alone local bishops?
Too many journalists forget — or don’t want to know — how cunning most paedophiles are, and how blind the rest of us were back then.
True, a few parents did quietly complain at the time. Ridsdale fled Apollo Bay when someone told him he was the talk of the pub. He then fled Inglewood in 1975 after abusing the son of a local policeman. He was moved on again when parents protested to Mulkearns, and police told the bishop to get Ridsdale treated.
But it was not until 1993 that Ridsdale was finally charged. Until then he’d been saved by the fear and shame of his victims, the embarrassment of parents, the naivety of locals, the complicity of some churchmen and the suspicious refusal of police to charge him.
No one could understand better than Paul Bongiorno this blindness and culture of silence. That’s because he, as a priest, once shared a house with this same Gerald Ridsdale.
What’s more, a witness to the royal commission claimed he’d told Father Bongiorno in 1970 or 1971 that Ridsdale had offered to watch him masturbating, but he’d done nothing.
To be fair, Bongiorno said this alleged conversation did not happen because he’d have remembered it.
And he told the ABC he never knew Ridsdale was a paedophile. “I had no idea what he was up to …
“There are married men and women now who sleep with their husbands and wives who don’t know that their husband or wife is having an affair.
“Let me tell you that Ridsdale never came into the presbytery in Warrnambool and said: ‘Guess how many boys I’ve raped today?’
“They hide it. It was certainly hidden from me.”
Indeed, Ridsdale says he confessed to nobody.
Let me be clear: I believe Bongiorno. The royal commission believed Bongiorno. The ABC believes him. The media also believes he knew nothing.
But why won’t they also believe George Pell?
Is it because Bongiorno is of the Left and Pell of the Right? Because Bongiorno left the church, but Pell became a symbol of it?
Andrew Bolt is a Herald Sun columnist