Louise Milligan on the monster priest no one will grieve

Louise Milligan is the author of Cardinal, which delved deeply into the issue of child abuse by priests of the Catholic Church, and the subsequent cover-ups. She has written a great deal on the Australia’s most notorious paedophile, Gerald Ridsdale, the former priest convicted of abusing 70 children, who died last week.

Fitz: Louise, thank you for your time. Around about now, as we speak, some kind of funeral for Gerald Ridsdale is taking place, and our assumption is that the Catholic Church will not be giving him any kind of sanctified farewell. In their absence, I can think of no one better than you to give him the eulogy he so desperately deserves, an honest assessment of his life, and the devastating consequences of his crimes.

Journalist Louise Milligan has written extensively on child abuse within the Catholic Church. Former priest and convicted paedophile Gerald Ridsdale, who died in February, may have had hundreds of victims.Credit:

LM: No. I don’t think that there should be a eulogy for Gerald Ridsdale. I think there should be a eulogy for the childhoods of so many little kids that were destroyed by him, the kids who deserved better. They were the ones who were let down so brutally, by “men of God”, who they looked up to and who they thought were people who would always do the right thing by them, and instead they did the worst thing by them. Worse than we can even imagine. The children are the ones we truly need to be thinking of right now.

Fitz: Fair enough. Can we at least try and understand how such a man as he could sexually abuse so many children, over so many years, in so many towns, and have so much of it covered up? Can we start with how you first came across him?

LM: Well, I knew of him, but he first truly came on my radar in 2015. I did a story about a woman called Donna Cushing, who, together with her three brothers, was abused by Gerald Ridsdale in the [Victorian] parish of Edenhope. They had a single mother and he was the local priest who offered to take them all away for the week, and what took place was so terrible that, very sadly, one of those boys went on to commit suicide. The impact on the whole family was just horrendous – and they were just one family affected in a whole trail of them dating back to the 1950s.

Fitz: So at what point did he become a byword for priestly paedophilia?

LM: Not really until Case Study 28 about sexual abuse in Victoria came up in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2015, with so many people cross-examined, and more and more revealed in shocking detail. Ridsdale was convicted in relation to abusing more than 70 kids, but it’s conservatively estimated that his victims run into the hundreds because he had 16 different priestly appointments at parishes over 29 years, and it was an average of 1.8 years in each parish. Obviously, they are just the ones that came to light. His abusing trajectory goes right back to when he was in the seminary in the 1950s, where he helps on camps for underprivileged children. When he was a trainee priest, he abused at least one boy and the chances are he abused more because wherever he went, he was just absolutely feral.

Fitz: And even then he was still in the low foothills of the mountains of shocking abuse to come.

LM: He’s ordained in 1961 and he begins abusing kids almost immediately. He was appointed to Mildura and he abused kids in Mildura. When the bishop is informed of this, he sends Ridsdale to counselling. But nothing happens. He’s not sent to police, and he continues to abuse. After that he goes to Swan Hill and abuses several children there, before he is moved on once more. Among other places, he goes to St Alipius to Apollo Bay to Inglewood, where his abuse became ever more devastating. It just keeps going on and on like that for decades.

Fitz: Leaving much the same trail of destruction in every parish?

Louise Milligan: “Fathers and mothers and teachers [of abused children] did warn the church hierarchy, but they were rebuffed, and they were sent away, and they were dismissed.”Credit: Simon Schluter

LM: Yes. There’s this grim map of the western districts of Victoria which stretches all the way out to the South Australian border, down to the Great Ocean Road through all these tiny little towns. By the time he got to Mortlake in 1981 he says in his own words that he was “absolutely out of control”. The principal at the local school, who was a nun, estimated he abused every single boy in a class. In that one diocese there were so many other abusive priests and brothers. I remember about the time of the royal commission, there was a class photo of boys at a school where Ridsdale was based for a time with a ring of paedophile Christian Brothers, and there were 13 kids from that class photo who were dead. So many kids who were victims of Ridsdale and those other men during those years went on to suicide, drank themselves to death, became drug addicts, died before their time.

Fitz: What was Ridsdale’s modus operandi? I was absolutely shocked to find that among his victims was a four-year-old, while other victims were in their late teens. But with the sheer number of victims he had, there can’t have been a lot of long-term grooming going on.

LM: His offending ran the gamut. In some cases it really was the classic grooming, going further and further with vulnerable victims and “this-is-our-little-secret” sort of thing. But in other cases, like one fellow I spoke to only recently who had been at Swan Hill, it was really violent. He describes being hit across the face and slapping him really hard on the ear – and then Ridsdale would get very violent with him, like, for instance, if he couldn’t sexually penetrate him. Ridsdale would just abuse anyone he could, mostly boys, but sometimes girls, too. Every time authorities were about to catch up with him, he was simply moved. I mean, in one parish he actually left in the middle of the night because the cops told him that they were investigating. The bishop again sent him for counselling, but then he was appointed to another parish. As the royal commission said, this showed “extraordinary disregard” for the children. The bishop had been approached by the police, Ridsdale has fled in the middle of the night, and the bishop just bunged him into another parish.

Fitz: But this gets to the heart of it, Louise. In any other job in Australia, through all the professions and trades, and going from Macquarie Bank to Maccas to Bunnings to the back of Bourke, any employee who had accusations of that kind put against their name by police would be immediately suspended until such times as their names were cleared. In fact, in all of those places, just the hint of such an accusation would set off every alarm in the joint: handle with care, proceed carefully, on the mere chance of guilt do not let them do any more damage. But this is the church, ostensibly there to look after the weak and vulnerable, first and foremost, and instead of reining him in, they continued to cut him loose!

LM: And this, in turn, is the heart of the horror. One of the things that many of the church witnesses said in the royal commission, the senior priests, was words to the effect of that “times were different then, and we didn’t have the same understanding then as we do now of child abuse”. It’s true that we didn’t have the same understanding of the lifelong psychological effects of child abuse. However, all of those things were crimes on the statute books, and in fact, sodomy with a child had been a capital offence. There’s no suggestion that it wasn’t something that was considered absolutely terrible, but it was just swept under the carpet.

Fitz: And it was all to protect the church?

LM: Absolutely.

Fitz: But here’s the other thing I don’t get. It is one thing for the church to protect itself. As appalling as that is, I can at least understand that. But what I don’t get is when he goes into a small community and commits his atrocities, cutting a swath of abuse through classes like an evil bowling ball, there was no father or mother or grandfather or fellow teacher who blew the whistle?

LM: But that’s not true, Peter! The point is that fathers and mothers and teachers did warn the church hierarchy, but they were rebuffed, and they were sent away, and they were dismissed. Perhaps the most devastating case is a young boy called Paul Levey, whose father agreed to allow Ridsdale to bring him to live with him in the presbytery at Mortlake at St Colman’s. Ridsdale had the young boy’s camp bed set up right next to his own bed. There were multiple people in that community who were extremely concerned about this, and Paul Levey’s own mother, Beverley, was truly alarmed, and people were writing to the bishop. But nothing was done to stop it. Levey was abused and the effect upon him was just so enormous. I spoke to an official in the Catholic Church who said a bishop asked Pope John Paul what he should do about this Ridsdale situation, and that Pope John Paul turned his back on him and walked away.

Fitz: Do you believe that?

LM: I absolutely believe it because the person who told me is a very staunch Catholic. So I don’t have any reason to disbelieve that account. It’s another example of how, structurally, the whole system was designed to protect the abusive priests and not the children. In fact, the royal commission heard from the bishops – including Anthony Fisher, who’s now the archbishop of Sydney and Archbishop Mark Coleridge at Brisbane – that the history of abuse in the Australian church was a catastrophic failure by the Catholic Church to protect the children.

Fitz: At least the Catholic Church has expressed remorse for what Ridsdale did, yes, and has taken steps to ensure it never happens again?

LM: It’s a complicated answer, because yes, the Catholic Church has expressed remorse about what happened. But on the other hand it continues to fight very hard in some civil cases of survivors seeking compensation for what Ridsdale and many others did. They have repeatedly sought permanent stays to stop victims of paedophile clergy from suing. A bishop has also successfully argued in the High Court – in another case of a paedophile priest – that priests are not employed by the diocese; that, essentially, in layman’s terms, they are employed by God and therefore the diocese is not vicariously liable. The bottom line is that despite all the learnings of the royal commission, despite all the law reform that happened as a result of the royal commission, the Catholic Church and – to be fair – other institutions, come up with other technical defences to stop survivors from suing successfully.

PF: Even when, in cases like Ridsdale, their own man was a monster, and they did nothing to stop him.

LM: I know what you’re saying. The other day, I did actually post that Ridsdale was “a monster”. But the thing is, he wasn’t a monster. He was a very sick man. I don’t think the fact that he was so sick excuses him in any way, but the real horror is that he was enabled by people who weren’t sick and who weren’t sex offenders. So I feel like those people are just as culpable as him because they knew how evil he was, or at least they had a pretty good idea of it, and they should have inquired more.

Fitz: You’ve covered the whole thing as a journalist and as an author. Did you try to keep a journalistic remoteness from it, to enhance objectivity, or was that impossible because the stuff you were dealing with was so devastating?

LM: Once the facts are forensically stacked up – there have been multiple criminal convictions and a five-year royal commission has upheld them too – I don’t see how anyone can be anything other than devastated. I don’t think it’s a journalist’s duty not to feel devastated on behalf of children whose lives were ruined because of this catastrophic failure. No one is disputing what he did. Ridsdale himself confessed to it. As a society, we should all feel devastated. It’s like the Holocaust. Some people might get tired of hearing about it, reading about it, but it’s important that exactly what happened is not allowed to slip from public memory. This happened. And it must never be allowed to happen again.

Fitz: Bravo, your work. And I reckon many people reading this will want to say thank you.

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via Twitter.

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