Royal Commission: Cardinal George Pell is just one of many who failed

That failure of men like George Pell to report child sex abuse remains a stain on church that can never be removed.

Cardinal George Pell. Picture: AP

Gerald Ridsdale had been an active pedophile for more than 20 years when he raped Steve Blacker.

Ridsdale sodomised the boy in the confessional at St Colman’s Church, Mortlake in 1982. Blacker was nine years old.

Blacker knew the unredacted sections of the Royal Commission were coming. He had been looking forward to the release.

But when the day came, he read the reports with sense of dread that quickly turned into devastation.

“It’s been a rough day, a terrible confirmation of what had happened and an official record of a conspiracy that was even worse than I thought.

“It was a shocking reminder that so much of this should never have happened,” Blacker said.

Few of Blacker’s childhood friends in Mortlake were spared debasement at the hands of Gerald Ridsdale. Since then lives have ended prematurely. Lives lost to a savage cocktail of hopelessness and recklessness. Blacker has struggled too, endured family breakdown and a raging gambling addiction that saw him fall foul of the law.

His hometown still suffers from the trauma. There are those who know and appreciate the extent of it. Others remain in denial. Brothers fight on the streets. Family feuds are the order of the day.

What chance does Mortlake have of finding some form of reconciliation?

“Nil,” Blacker says. “No one wants to go back there.”

Blacker’s tormentor, Gerald Ridsdale had been shanghaied around the Diocese since he was ordained in 1961. There were complaints wherever he went. Ballarat East, Warrnambool, Mildura, Inglewood, Edenhope, Mortlake, Horsham. He had abused children as a seminarian in the late 1950s.

Gerald Ridsdale.

Either as a relieving priest or by formal parish appointment, Ridsdale presided in 16 of the 55 parishes in the Ballarat Diocese which stretches from Portland on the coast in Victoria’s south west all the way to the Murray River towns of Mildura and Swan Hill.

In Apollo Bay in 1969, he was approached by a man who had had a bit too much to drink who told him, “There’s a lot of people around here talking about you and kids.” Ridsdale packed his bags and fled.

In Inglewood, an angry father of a victim bashed on the door of the presbytery in the wee hours of the morning. Ridsdale shot through again, driving through the night before coming to a stop seeking succour and comfort at an adjoining parish presbytery. He’d only been at Inglewood for a few months.

To say this was unusual behaviour that would not evoke discussion from other priests in the diocese beggars belief.

Ridsdale is officially Australia’s most prolific sex criminal. In terms of prosecutions, sheer number of victims and serious sex offences, no one else comes close. The real figure may never be known but it is entirely possible that his victims within the Diocese or when he was sin-binned in the US or in Sydney, may total 500 or more.

The monster of Mildura, Monsignor John Day, never had his day in court. There were more than 100 Towards Healing claims in relation to his offending. That’s more than 100 victims who came forward. There are many more. I’ve spoken to more than a dozen of his victims who did not engage with the church’s compensation program. He was an active pedophile for 50 years.

Grandiose, forbidding, fists thumping at the pulpit, Day would lecture parishioners about lax standards in our society, bikinis on Bondi Beach and the threat of juvenile delinquency just minutes after he’d raped an altar boy in the sacristy at Sacred Heart Church in Mildura.

Day raped kids for his immediate sexual gratification. He understood that because the church put him on a higher plane than the rest of us, he could do as he pleased.

Forget about the tedious psychoanalysis of clerical paedophilia. These crimes are an abuse of power perpetrated on the most vulnerable group in our society. Day, Ridsdale and the other numerous priests and religious pedophiles creeping around the diocese raped kids because they could.

Does anyone believe that Ridsdale and Day are better men than you and me? The Roman Catholic Church did and if it wasn’t for the embarrassing knowledge of their offending dripping out into the public domain, it still would.

When Day died in 1979, he was eulogised by Bishop Mulkearns who lauded the old deviant for “his humble magnificence.”

In an address in 2018, Pope Francis highlighted the problem.

“Clericalism arises from an elitist and exclusivist vision of vocation, that interprets the ministry received as a power to be exercised rather than as a free and generous service to be given. This leads us to believe that we belong to a group that has all the answers and no longer needs to listen or learn anything.”

Compound the notion of superhuman beings in dog collars with a system of laws that must prevail wherever there is conflict with the laws of the land and we get to the nub of the problem.

A statement issued by a spokesperson for Cardinal Pell yesterday dismissed the unredacted report from the Royal Commission.

“These views are not supported by evidence. He is especially surprised by the statements in the report about the earlier transfers of Gerald Ridsdale discussed by the Ballarat Diocesan Consultors in 1977 and 82.”

The language is deliberate.

A royal commission does not provide views, opinions or speculation. It makes findings. And those findings are in part that George Pell knew of Ridsdale’s offending at critical moments.

In the case of Ridsdale, it wasn’t just Pell. It was a committee of priests with Bishop Ronald Mulkearns presiding. Of those alive at the time of the Royal Commission’s hearings, Frs Bryant, Melican, Arundell, Madden, McInerney, Torpy and Bishop Finnigan gave evidence. All offered equivocal responses and suffered memory loss. Some provided moments of candour but these were rare. Finnigan, who had provided the commission with testimony in a private hearing, turned his back on almost all of it when he gave evidence in public.

The fixation may be on one man’s knowledge of Ridsdale’s offending and the failure to intercede and prevent the ongoing threat to children in towns small and large across western Victoria. The real story is that so many men presumed better than the rest of us knew and did nothing.

What these men did with their silence and misplaced loyalty would not just lead to the crimes continuing in new parishes on unsuspecting victims but would dramatically escalate the number of offences and the number of victims.

In 1973, the number of Ridsdale’s victims could at least be quantified. By the time he was forced out of Mortlake a decade later, his victims could only be guessed at.

That failure of men now includes George Pell. It remains a stain on the diocese and more generally the church that can never be removed.