Cardinal George Pell facing sole blame for failures he condemns in Catholic Church

HIS day in the witness box started in the terrible way too familiar for Cardinal George Pell, writes Andrew Bolt.

Pell facing blame for failures he condemns

HIS day in the witness box started in the terrible way too familiar for Cardinal George Pell. Thanks to a pushy security guard, reporters were once again filing angry stories blaming him for the sins of others.

It was a metaphor for what followed in the next four hours in which Pell actually attacked his own church for its “catastrophic” handling of paedophile priests.

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Pell had been surrounded by Roman police, Vatican security and hotel guards when he entered the Hotel Quirinale to give evidence by video link.

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An SBS reporter, Brett Mason, refused a demand by one excitable guard to back away and was given what he told me was a “kind of punch” to the stomach. In the melee his cameraman had his camera knocked out of his hands.

Pell’s own Vatican security was instantly accused in febrile news reports of having “punched”, “bashed”, “roughed up” and “tackled” both SBS men, forcing Pell to deny his own team was involved.

What followed in the witness box was more of the same.

Pell, now the third-most powerful figure in the Vatican, made clearer than ever his condemnation for his church’s handling of the rape and sexual assault of hundreds of Australian children by priests.

“The church has made enormous mistakes,” he said.

Its leaders had often dismissed warnings about paedophile priests, sometimes in “absolutely scandalous circumstances”, first to protect the church from shame and later “to protect its assets”.

The hiding of the crimes of Gerald Ridsdale, the most notorious paedophile priest, had particularly been “a catastrophe for the victims and a catastrophe for the church”.

Pell, who as archbishop of Melbourne in 1996 created the first compensation scheme for abuse victims of any Australian church, called for a national compensation fund run by government, with the guilty made to pay. He also said there was a prima facie case for the Australian Catholic Church to make former bishop Ronald Mulkearns face trial by a church tribunal for protecting Ridsdale for so long, shuffling him between parishes thus allowing him to abuse perhaps hundreds more children.

Even critics who have tried so hard to make Pell the scapegoat, calling him a “coward”, a “liar” and “scum”, could hardly have expected a more damning attack on his own church.

Yet what followed seemed a determined attempt to establish whether Pell himself was part of the scandal.

The royal commission’s counsel focused first on what Pell, as an assistant priest more than 40 years ago in Swan Hill, had known of abuse allegations against a priest 200km away in another parish — Monsignor John Day.

Pell then had to explain why he knew so little about sexual abuse allegations against Christian Brothers teachers in Ballarat when he was a priest there. Pell explained he had almost no involvement in those schools.

What was curious about this line of questioning is that Pell had no direct involvement in either case, and that so many others had grossly failed their far greater responsibility to act.

Not all of those who failed were churchmen, either. Take the case of John Day. A local teacher and a policeman had told Mulkearns that Day had been responsible for a “widespread moral misconduct over a period of 13 years”.

Mulkearns and his fellow consulters (senior priests not including Pell) just moved Day on to another town, which Pell said was “quite unacceptable”.

Even Victoria’s ­solicitor-general ruled there was insufficient evidence to charge Day. Pell, with some frustration, said that seemed “quite unusual to me” asking “why there was no prosecution”.

So why this public determination to make Pell almost alone take the blame for the failure by so many others far more blameworthy than himself, on the evidence so far?

Is it that he’s just the most senior Catholic they can find?

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