Australia’s Cardinal Pell knew of abuse by pedophile priest, government inquiry found

Cardinal George Pell, shown in May 2018, was released from prison last month after Australia’s highest court cleared him of child sex crimes. Australian Cardinal George Pell knew that a notorious pedophile priest had been sexually abusing children years before the man’s arrest and had been aware of the Roman Catholic Church’s clergy abuse problem since the early 1970s, a government inquiry concluded. The inquiry rejected Pell’s assertion, made when he gave evidence by video link from Rome in 2016, that he was deceived by church officials about Australia’s most notorious pedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale, and disturbed Melbourne parish priest Peter Searson. The inquiry also found that Pell had “turned his mind to the prudence” of Ridsdale taking boys camping in 1973, because “if priests were one-on-one with a child, then they could sexually abuse a child, or at least provoke gossip about such a prospect.” “We are also satisfied that by 1973 Cardinal Pell was not only conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy, but that he also had considered measures of avoiding situations which might provoke gossip about it,” the three authors of the report wrote. Pell was a Melbourne auxiliary bishop when he met with a staff delegation from a Catholic primary school to discuss complaints about Searson, whom the inquiry described as an “unstable and disturbed individual.” Complaints included that Searson harassed staff and parents, killed and tortured animals in front of children, threatened children with a pistol and a knife, showed children a body in a coffin and used the children’s toilets.