A crowdfunding campaign has enabled a group of 15 Australian sexual abuse survivors and their supporters to confront Australia’s most senior Catholic priest in Rome today.
But they appear unlikely to receive the action and support they had been hoping for after the cardinal refused to accept responsibility for the hundreds of cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by priests under his watch in Australia during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
George Pell, who as the Vatican’s finance minister is also one of the most senior cardinals in the Catholic Church, has been providing testimony via video link from a Rome hotel room to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse since yesterday (Feb. 29). He’s the highest-ranking Vatican official to testify on Church abuse.
Survivors watching the cardinal audibly gasped (video) yesterday after he impassively told the counsel assisting the commission that the actions of a well-known pedophile priest weren’t “of much interest” to him at the time.
“Did you subsequently know, not that he [Australian pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale] offended at Inglewood, leave that to one side, but that it was common knowledge of his interfering with children at Inglewood?” the counsel, Gail Furness, asked Pell in the publicly televised testimony.
“I couldn’t say that I ever knew that everyone knew. I knew a number of people did. I didn’t know whether it was common knowledge or whether it wasn’t. It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me,” Pell responded, to large, audible gasps.
Furness, who sounded as stunned at the testimony as some of the survivors, pushed Pell for more answers. “What wasn’t of much interest to you, cardinal?” she asked.
“The suffering, of course, was real, and I very much regret that, but I had no reason to turn my mind to the extent of the evils that Ridsdale had perpetrated,” Pell said with little visible expression.
“Well, an individual can only do what it is possible to do, and everybody has a responsibility to try to preserve the moral health of the community in ways that are real and practical,” he later added.
It was unclear from the testimony whether the gasps came from the room at the Hotel Quirinale in Rome, where survivors and the media were watching Pell, or in Sydney, where the commission is sitting.
Crowdfunded confrontation
The presence of the survivors from Australia at Pell’s testimony in Rome, which is expected to last three to four days, was made possible by a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than AUD$200,000 (US$143,000) to cover the cost of their flights, food, and accommodation.
The campaign was launched after Pell’s lawyer, Allan Myers, twice tendered medical documents to the commission that said Pell was too unwell to fly to Australia. (Myers is one of Australia’s priciest lawyers, and the Catholic church is paying controversially large sums for his services.)
Outraged by the commission’s decision to allow Pell to provide evidence from Rome, the survivors decided to travel to him. One of them, Peter Blenkiron, exited the airport in Rome wearing a T-shirt with a picture of himself as a child.
The trip may offer little consolation for the victims, many of whom expressed their frustration with Pell to reporters outside the hotel following the testimony.
“We are speaking of moral leaders of towns and cities,” said abuse survivor David Ridsdale, also Gerald Ridsdale’s nephew. “And for them to have no interest in such behavior [sexual abuse] seems remarkable.”