Abuse royal commission: victims had little chance of escape

So much for the hysteria whipped up by George Pell’s detractors and their rabid accusations of “coward’’ and “scum’’.

The video link worked well and over four hours, from 10pm to 2am Rome time, the cardinal, 74, answered questions about his days as a young priest in Swan Hill and Ballarat. He was frank and incisive. He will repeat the exercise every day, at the same time, until Thursday.

His conscience would never allow him to “defend the indefensible’’. He called it as he saw it. His regrets and sadness for what so many had endured were clear. The church’s mistakes were “enormous’’. It had let people down. Ronald Mulkearns’s handling of child sex abuse was a “catastrophe’’ for the victims and for the church. Effective action much earlier would have avoided an enormous amount of suffering.

Listening to Pell recount the alarming events, shameful negligence and naive mindsets that prevailed 45 years ago, it was apparent the children preyed on by Gerald Ridsdale in a string of parishes and by John Day in Mildura had little chance of escaping their predators’ clutches.

Time and again, church authorities gave these perpetrators and others the benefit of the doubt, chance after chance. In those far-off days, if a priest denied claims of child abuse his brother priests — including Pell — were “very strongly inclined’’ to accept his word.

As the Ballarat case study unfolds, it is also reasonable to wonder about the actions, or lack of them, of Victoria Police. Yesterday, Pell was questioned about the case of Day, whose alleged abuses were detailed in a newspaper article in 1972. “Quite a few’’ people had suspicions about Day. But he was not charged. A year after Day’s resignation in 1972, Mulkearns assigned him to a new parish, Timboon — after reportedly speaking to police. The presumption of innocence prevailed, and civil and church authorities allowed Day and others to take advantage of it for their own criminal ends.

In the same vein, former priest and psychiatrist Richard Evans made it clear to the commission last week that the police knew about Ridsdale as early as the mid-1970s: “While he was a priest at Inglewood, an allegation was made against him of child sexual abuse, which he denied, and he was referred to see me, or came to see me, largely with symptoms of anxiety about being investigated and the challenge that that might make to his priestly status …

“After one or two sessions I received a communication from the police, who were looking into the case; by the way, it was reported to the police, the exact mechanism I don’t know, but the police were certainly investigating it and knew about it. The police informed me that they would not be pressing charges. However, the policeman added that they — I forget the actual word — felt, believed, thought, he was guilty and would benefit from treatment.’’

Such police, like church authorities, should be held to account. Ridsdale could, and should, have been stopped years before he was jailed in 1993.