George Pell: man more sinned against

Cardinal George Pell attends a press conference at the Vatican Radio headquarters, in Rome, Tuesday, March 31, 2015. The Vatican finance minister has said he hopes to avoid financial scandal with the upcoming Jubilee year, saying the plans will be subject to new Vatican procedures to ensure they follow international standards for transparency and accountability. Cardinal George Pell outlined the Vatican's financial reform during a conference Tuesday to launch a book on better managing church assets, a priority for Pope Francis after years of financial scandal and mismanagement at the Holy See. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

George Pell’s most strident critics want the narrative to be Sesame Street simple.

They paint the nation’s most influential Catholic as being knowingly complicit in covering up sex crimes and then ripping off the victims by setting up a duplicitous and immoral redress scheme.

In both cases those critics are wrong.

At the same time, the evidence is pointing to deep flaws, with the most salacious of claims against Pell from his years in the diocese of Ballarat in western Victoria, where some of the world’s worst offending occurred.

But like the man himself, Cardinal Pell’s position in relation to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is deeply nuanced.

It is quite possible that he will be excoriated by the inquiry, with the church hierarchy in Australia worried that the commission is eager for a high-profile scalp.

Royal commissions do not work like normal courts; they have greater licence to destroy reputations with rhetoric and sharp commentary. They are not bound by the best evidence rule and are at liberty to admit hearsay evidence.

It is for these reasons that Pell is exposed.

The commission has evidence that puts the cardinal close to some of the most contentious issues and appears to be giving weight to priestly gossip regarding other clergy.

This gossip, although not documented, may raise the question of how the cardinal could not have known there were pedophile priests operating in his dioceses.

For good reason, there is deep sensitivity around the movement in the 1970s, 80s and 90s of serial Ballarat offender Gerald Ridsdale, who is feared to have sexually assaulted hundreds of children.

This was even though bishop Ronald Mulkearns, who ran the Ballarat diocese from 1971 to 1997, knew of Ridsdale’s offending but failed to act, responding in the old-school manner of burying the problem in the hope it would disappear.

At the time of Ridsdale’s offending, Pell was a relatively junior clergyman, but he was one of the consultors who met to ratify the movement of Ridsdale around the Ballarat diocese, although the only certainty about these transfers is that they were the work almost entirely of Mulkearns.

This is the way the church worked.

Father Eric Bryant, a parish priest in the Ballarat diocese, told the commission that he was at the September 1982 consultors meeting when Mulkearns said that there was a homosexuality ”problem’’ and Ridsdale needed to leave the parish of Mortlake, in western Victoria. The minutes show Pell was at that meeting, as he was with others where Ridsdale’s movements were reportedly discussed.

Pell was due to give evidence to the commission this week, but a heart condition has prevented him flying to Australia. When he is fully fit, he is also likely to face questioning from the commission over what he knew — and when — about the late priest Peter Searson, who was an unhinged sex offender in the Melbourne parish of Doveton, when Pell was the regional bishop in charge.

In 1989, a staff delegation from the local Doveton school met Pell and presented their grievances regarding Searson, which did not include sexual abuse of children. The grievances included harassment of staff and parents, showing children a dead body in a coffin and cruelty to an animal in front of young students.

A memo tendered to the commission states that Pell indicated to the staff that all he thought he could do was pass the information on to the vicar-general.

Bishop emeritus Hilton Deakin was then vicar-general and told the inquiry he had no recollection of Pell sending him anything about the meeting.

Monsignor Tom Doyle, the director of Catholic education at the time, told the commission he knew of no reason why Pell could not have gone to the archbishop instead of the vicar-general, although the archbishop at the time was the late Frank Little, who is notorious for failing to address rampant offending in the Melbourne archdiocese. On the evidence, it would have been pointless to go to Little.

The incumbent Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, has told the commission he would have felt that he had to take action “straight away” if presented with the same information relating to Searson.

The commission also has evidence before it that Pell allowed a sex-offending priest to remain in the Catholic system, despite having admitted molesting a 16-year-old. Father Barry Robinson admitted to Little that he had offended against the teenager but after treatment abroad was given a parish placement with certain conditions to minimise the chances of offending.

As archbishop, Pell signed off on Robinson’s placement as an assistant priest in Williamstown, a seaside suburb near Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge, even though the investigation wasn’t closed until 2005.

Pell’s decision not to give evidence at the royal commission this week was inevitably treated with cynicism from some sections of the community.

Yet the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, makes clear what anyone who has known 74-year-old Pell will understand. He has been quite desperate to appear and merely has succumbed to a long-term heart condition that makes flying deeply problematic.

“His nature is to confront trouble, never to run from it. He doesn’t avoid challenges,’’ Fisher tells The Australian. “It’s very unfair, I know he was so determined to come.’’

At the same time, senior Catholics are alarmed at the manner in which Pell has become a lightning rod for anger from victims, lapsed Catholics and some media. Had he appeared before the royal commission this week it would have been a circus.

Fisher says the criticism of the Melbourne Response redress scheme set up when Pell became archbishop of Melbourne in 1996 fails to take into account that it was, in a church sense, a trailblazing endeavour.

(There have also been relentless distortions about the way the scheme has run. It does not require the survivor to prove the abuse and compares favourably with other state-run schemes at the time).

Fisher also points to another key fact: Pell’s personality can polarise the community.

“He is very direct. He tells it as he would see it and they (his critics) would like more subtlety,’’ he says. “He is very much a trad­itional Aussie man.’’

Pell’s social conservatism has also attracted criticism from the Left, but his own abruptness and — at times — questionable judgment has added fuel to the bonfire of anger.

His decision to attend court in 1993 to support the rampant paedophile Ridsdale has never been forgotten in the Ballarat diocese and may well be the standout reason he has copped so much bile from victims.

This decision to support Ridsdale was — and remains — jaw-dropping. Yet at the same time there is a strong argument that Pell did more for resolving the sex-abuse crisis in Australia than any other church figure of the modern era.

In Melbourne, he inherited a parlous legacy from archbishop Little in 1996, and rapidly turned his attention to dealing with what was ostensibly a corrupt regime riddled with cover-ups.

Indeed, within the church hierarchy, it is a competition to see who failed more gravely on the sex abuse front. Was it Little of Melbourne or Mulkearns of Ballarat?

Jeff Kennett, the former Victorian premier, knows Pell well. He likes him, too. He recalls a meeting the pair had in Kennett’s Spring Street office in 1996, when Kennett made clear that the church needed to deal with the scandal.

On the sex abuse issue, Kennett says: “I don’t think that George has ever run away from it.

“I was not one of the (Catholic) flock and I said to him if he doesn’t fix it, I will. I said that not as a threat (but) as an encouragement.’’

The exposure of Ridsdale, by a courageous victim from the small west-Victorian community of Edenhope, was the boil that needed to be lanced, detailing to the community the extent of the problem across Victoria.

So vast and so horrific is the offending that it is almost impossible to find a Victorian Catholic without a direct or indirect connection to the scandal. The victims, when unreported cases are included, probably run into the thousands.

Wayne Chamley, the spokesman for the victims’ group Broken Rites, has been a ferocious campaigner for the victims of church abuse. Chamley is like many who have been well versed in the sins of the fathers.

On the commission, he says: “I haven’t been going, I’ve heard it all before. What I see the focus of the commission at the moment is to unravel a conspiracy; these last two weeks have been much more forensic.

“Georgie Porgie (Pell) is a clincher, he is either going to say he did or didn’t know.’’

Chamley does not believe Pell should be the sole focus of attention, rather that he is one of a core group who — he believes — must have known offending was occurring in Ballarat and Melbourne.

On the issue of priestly gossip, “All of the priests must have heard about it,’’ he says. “They’ve got time on their hands.’’ But he adds that it’s not all about Pell: “They are collectively culpable.’’

The extent to which the church nationally is angry with the way Little ran Melbourne (from 1974-96) and Mulkearns ran Ballarat (from 1971-97) should not be underestimated, let alone how the victims must feel.

Mulkearns avoided the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse in 2013, citing ill health and memory loss after a stroke in 1998; he was recently treated for cancer.

The internal anger about Little and Mulkearns spilled over in that Victorian parliamentary inquiry when Archbishop Hart admitted Little had covered up abuse, which is a crime that can carry a jail term.

Hart told the inquiry Little had kept no records of offending, a scandalous concession that deeply muddied the Little legacy.

“The reason why we were slow at the start was that these awful criminals are secretive and cunning and devious and they’ve kept their evil deeds secret. And that is deserving of great condemnation,’’ Hart said of the nature of the offending. Pell said at the time he had recently discovered that Mulkearns had destroyed key documents.

That parliamentary inquiry heard that Mulkearns was aware of child-abuse accusations against Ridsdale but moved him to different parishes. Pell also was critical of the Little reign.

Crucially, he told the 2013 inquiry that priests did not gossip about offending.

“If we’d been gossips, which we weren’t ... we would have realised earlier just how widespread this business was,” Pell said.

Ridsdale admitted to the commission in May that priests would talk about other priests at meetings and he supposed some of them would have been talking about him.

Retired priest William Melican, Monsignor Doyle and bishop emeritus Deakin also told the commission that priests gossiped among themselves.

On Mulkearns, Pell told the inquiry: “His actions were followed by disastrous consequences.’’

None of which absolves Cardinal Pell of criticism, but it does put his position in context.

In the early days in Ballarat, the now cardinal — and effectively treasurer of the Vatican — was in large part a victim of geography.

When appointed archbishop of Melbourne in 1996 he became the national architect of the response to Catholic sex abuse.

While the redress scheme was inevitably imperfect, it compared favourably with responses by governments in Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia for victims of abuse in state care.

The silly, salacious claims including that Pell had joked to another priest about Ridsdale’s offending are falling over. Which leaves the cardinal in the hands of the commission and, to a key extent, his own evidence.

Whenever he is well enough to appear.