George Pell’s death lets misplaced recriminations fly

Cardinal George Pell arriving for his appearance at the Royal Commission on March 26, 2014, in Sydney, Australia. Picture: Don Arnold/Getty Images

After George Pell gave evidence to the Royal Commission on matters relating to the sorrow of Ballarat, his third of four appearances, I wrote that all that was needed was the intervention of one decent man of the cloth to put a stop to the epidemic of child sexual abuse.

But that is an oversimplification.

Not even one good copper could put a stop to it. Denis Ryan tried to prosecute Monsignor John Day in Mildura in 1972 and lost his job over it. I chronicled Ryan’s story in Unholy Trinity. The book was published in 2013.

It is an appalling tale of betrayal and miscarriage of justice that had its denouement in the Royal Commission with Victoria Police throwing their hands up and ultimately apologising to Ryan. But the collusion between church and state went on well after 1972.

The prolific nature of offending against children by clerics within the Ballarat diocese and more broadly in Victoria could only thrive with multiple failures across religious, educational and welfare institutions, compounded by a wretched corruption within the criminal justice system.

Gerald Ridsdale now languishes in prison.

While Pell has passed away amid easy recriminations, Gerald Ridsdale remains barely mentioned. His offending against children was so prolific that on convictions alone he stands as the worst sex offender this country has ever seen. Ridsdale now languishes in prison.

Joining him in the confines of the Hopkins Correctional Centre in Ararat is a litany of disgraced clerics, including another offender whose crimes against children are almost beyond comprehension, the Christian Brother and former principal at St Alipius Primary School, Robert Best.

In 2017, Best pleaded guilty to 24 counts of indecent assault on boys aged between eight and 11 years. He molested them over a 20-year period between 1968 and 1988 at the Ballarat East school as well as St Leo’s College in Box Hill and St Joseph’s College, Geelong. He was already serving a 15-year sentence for child sex offences.

Incontinent and in ill health, Best will remain incarcerated until at least 2027. Like Ridsdale, in all probability, he will die in jail. Good riddance.

Already gone to God or perhaps elsewhere was Denis Ryan’s nemesis, John Day, a sociopathic pervert with more than 100 victims. Day was so certain he could molest and rape children with impunity, he sexually assaulted boys and girls while driving his car in the company of nuns. He died unrepentant and unpunished in 1978.

At his funeral service in Warrnambool, Day was eulogised by his boss and protector, the Bishop of Ballarat, Ronald Mulkearns, for his “humble magnificence”.

Bishop Ronald Mulkearns before the Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse.

So much for eulogies.

It is important to understand the history of one of the darkest times in our social history. After decades of abuse, the chronology reached a turning point in 1992 when Gerald Ridsdale was convicted for the first time. The floodgates began to open and dark secrets were starting to be dragged into the light.

Back then, the Church and Victoria Police were scuttling about trying to get their ducks in a row. Mulkearns oversaw a process where offending priests were convinced to leave the Church in order to spare the diocese any further embarrassment.

One had a conviction for sexual assault of an adult in a public toilet in Moonee Ponds along with the most unpriestly conviction of attempting to escape lawful custody. Another was known to have raped a 12-year-old boy. The abuse continued for another seven years. The third, himself a notorious figure at the Royal Commission, has since been convicted of multiple child sex offenders.

They weren’t laicised, or defrocked in the vernacular. They were simply given shut-up money and told to leave. These three priests in name only, wandered off into communities that could not possibly understand the grave risks they posed. One found his way to Cape York Peninsula. There are no reports of his offending against children in indigenous communities in Far North Queensland but given the prolific nature of his criminality, there is little doubt in my mind that he did.

Denis Ryan tried to prosecute Monsignor John Day, pictured, in Mildura in 1972 and lost his job over it.

Denis Ryan’s namesake, Colin Ryan, was a detective in Warrnambool who pursued offending priests with vigour and ultimately success in the 1990s. Colin Ryan told me, “I learned never to send anything to Melbourne. Things would simply disappear.”

Ten years ago, a victim of Ridsdale contacted me to tell his story. He had been raped by Ridsdale in the bedroom of his own home in 1982. His older brother, too, had been raped by Ridsdale and his younger brother, then 10, sexually assaulted.

Their mother learned of the offending in 1985 and contacted the then Sex Crimes Squad who travelled to Mortlake to take statements from the three boys. The youngest boy’s statement led to charges which became part of Ridsdale’s first conviction. But the more serious charges of penetrative rape as stated by his two older brothers were not acted upon.

Thus, Ridsdale’s first conviction in 1992 was for crimes at the lower end of the scale and Ridsdale, who pleaded guilty, received a 12-month custodial sentence with a minimum of three months. This was the outcome from Australia’s worst sex criminal’s first appearance before a judge.

Many years later, the victim contacted the SANO Task Force (established by Victoria Police to investigate historic and new allegations of child sexual abuse) and asked why his statement had not been acted upon. Weeks later, he was contacted by officers from SANO, who told him his statement had vanished.

Former Christian Brother Edward Dowlan.

Another police officer, who in 1992 was the head of a small unit of just four coppers known as the Community Policing Squad. He had become deluged with complaints and begged and pleaded with the powers that be within VicPol for the establishment of a properly resourced task force. He was roughly ignored, and he ultimately left the force frustrated and angry.

This good copper’s investigations led to the first conviction of the Christian Brother Edward Dowlan, a sadistic child rapist, but it would be almost another 20 years before VicPol established the SANO Task Force.

In 1963 as an assistant priest in Carlton, Father Peter Searson was known to churchgoers as a peculiar man. He was transferred to Sunbury as parish priest where numerous complaints about his behaviour, including allegations of sexual assaults came to nothing. Shanghaied to Doveton, Searson’s conduct became even more lurid and dangerous.

One formal complaint of a sexual assault of a young girl was investigated by Victoria Police.

Shanghaied to Doveton, Peter Searson’s conduct became even more lurid and dangerous.

As inquiries continued, an entry was made into VicPol’s software that tracked investigations in progress that the allegations did not constitute a sexual assault.

The entry read:

“All Searson has done is sit the child on his knee and get the child to kiss him on the cheek,” the police report said. “[The victim] stated that when she sat on his knee he dragged her up and on to his lap where she felt his erect penis rubbing on her back.”

Later in the Royal Commission, Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana stated that, on the available evidence, at very least a sexual assault had been committed by Searson.

Fontana had made inquiries but to this day, no one knows who made that entry which put the kibosh on the investigation, but it could only have been a member of VicPol.

It was Task Force SANO’s investigations that led to George Pell being charged with sexual assault. His conviction was quashed by the High Court in 2020 and he was released from prison after spending more than a year behind bars.

The question is, did SANO undertake its investigations of Pell to compensate for VicPol’s manifest historical failures to properly pursue clerical child sex offending? In the absence of a judicial inquiry, we will never know.

Former police officer Denis Ryan received a formal apology from Victoria Police. Picture: AAP

What we do know is the police actively colluded and conspired with Bishop Ronald Mulkearns to ensure that Monsignor John Day was not charged in 1972.

Denis Ryan received a formal apology from Victoria Police. He was finally vindicated after more than 40 years of lies and obfuscation by the force he had served with distinction. But the general public and the victims of institutional child sex abuse have received no similar expression of regret. For VicPol this was a step too far, an acknowledgment that public faith and confidence in the thin blue line had been lost.

While the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse stuck a toe in the water of police corruption, it did not delve much deeper beyond Denis Ryan’s account of police corruption.

The question remains why were no clerics prosecuted in Victoria until Michael Glennon’s conviction in 1979, and then no more until Ridsdale’s first conviction in 1992, when clearly there was a lot of offending going on?

I guarantee you the answer is not attributable to the failures of just one man.