11

ON DEFENCE OF THE INDEFENSIBLE

A lot of people here really miss you, Georgie, they really think you ought to just get on a plane. We all just want you to come home, Cardinal Pell, I know you’re not feeling well, and being crook ain’t much fun, even so, we think you should come home.

Lyrics by Tim Minchin, ‘Come Home (Cardinal Pell)’

On the final night of February in the leap year of 2016, a sleek car delivered a septuagenarian to Il Quirinale, the highest of Rome’s seven hills. Il Quirinale is home to the Italian presidential palazzo. The septuagenarian who walked through the softly falling rain into the 4-star Hotel Quirinale was not a president, nor a pope, although at times he did have a rather majestic way about him. He was Cardinal George Pell, Prefect for the Secretariat for the Economy in the Holy See. And to put it extremely mildly, his presence was highly anticipated.

Pell was to give evidence about two Royal Commission ‘case studies’, which involved his time in Ballarat in his earlier years, and also his time in Melbourne as an auxiliary bishop. Pell hadn’t meant to be in Rome. He was supposed to be giving evidence in Melbourne and it had been set down for December the year before. It had carried over from when the Commission sat in Ballarat in May, when attempts to hear his evidence by videolink had been highly unsatisfactory, with the feed constantly disrupted.

There had been much disquiet in Ballarat when it was discovered that just before that videolink hearing, Pell had ‘secretly’ returned to his home town—and therefore could have provided the evidence in person. During that visit, he toured St Patrick’s College with principal John Crowley, and appeared in its glossy magazine, The Shamrock. Crowley was at the time very new to the job and came to regret the inadvertent message it sent—given his school was already smarting from the revelations in the Royal Commission that it had in the 1970s been an epicentre of abuse by a ring of Christian Brothers. Crowley has since quietly reached out to many survivors—even offering personal financial support to the sick and cash-strapped. His school has been a model of how to address child protection, and as one survivor said to me ‘it’s probably the safest place in the country a child can go to school now’. Crowley believes the Cardinal is of course entitled to visit his alma mater, but knows that that photograph caused great pain to the men who had been abused there as boys. The fact that he turned up, unannounced, just before he gave videolink evidence, angered his home-town community.

As to the Cardinal’s December cancellation, it came from nowhere. On 11 December, the Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane, Brian Finnigan, was being cross-examined when, after the luncheon adjournment, Pell’s legal team indicated they had an application to make. Ears pricked up around the courtroom. Allan Myers, QC, addressed the bench, saying that he was applying for his client to give his evidence by videolink—that is, he would not return to Australia. ‘The grounds of the application are based upon the health of Cardinal Pell.’ The room went into uproar. ‘Get him a fucking air ambulance!’ yelled one woman. The Chair, Peter McClellan, was forced to try to calm the room, to make sure that ‘Mr Myers has a proper opportunity to put his application’. A medical letter was provided to the Commission, written by one Professor Patrizio Polisca, director of complex emergency care medicine at the Tor Vergata University Teaching Hospital in Rome. Somehow, between April and December, Pell had developed a heart condition so troubling that he could not fly back to Australia. Polisca cited ‘hypertension, ischemic heart disease, complicated by previous myocardial infarction and cardiac dysfunction’. He said a long flight risked heart failure in his patient. Pell later said that he had collapsed twice after getting off long-haul flights from Australia.

Google the name Patrizio Polisca and what comes up first is not medical journal articles, but religious ones. For Polisca, a cardiologist, had been head of Vatican Health Services. In 2014, Polisca was on hand to help the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to unanimously declare a miracle by the late Pope Paul VI, who had interceded in an ‘inexplicable’ healing of a patient, according to Professor Polisca. Paul VI was beatified in October of that year—the first stage in becoming a saint. The first Google image search result of Polisca brings a picture of him shaking the former Pope Benedict’s hand. Pope Benedict being the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pell’s great promoter in the Vatican. Polisca was on staff until 2015 as the Pope’s personal physician. Polisca was removed by Pope Francis eighteen months before Pell asked not to fly, but remained as Ratzinger’s official doctor. He also remained on the Congregation for the Causes of Saints job, lest a medical opinion might be sought when another miracle ought to be declared.

The Royal Commission’s Chair was, like so many people who find themselves up against Pell, snookered. While Justice McClellan noted that people with Pell’s condition did fly, the Commission couldn’t exactly force the Cardinal to come back and risk him dying on the plane. However, many argued that there were other options available—such as having a medical specialist accompany the Cardinal home, first class, in short stages, with breaks in between. Seems, prima facie, like a lot of money to spend. But Pell always flies first class anyway. He, via the Church, can afford to splash around $20 000 a day on his Queen’s Counsel, Allan Myers, not to mention the rest of his legal team.

Not only that, Pell was offered the services of local medical specialists. Dr Richard Sallie, a gastroenterologist from Nedlands in Perth, dashed off a pitch-perfect missive to the Cardinal via the letters section of The Sydney Morning Herald:

 

I hope you get well soon. However, on a practical note, I am a doctor with experience in transporting critically ill patients on long-haul commercial flights. To ensure that your critical testimony to the Royal Commission isn’t misconstrued and the Catholic Church unfairly vilified as a result of any inaccuracies that might result from the video testimony, I would happily travel to Rome to escort you safely back to Australia. I am certain a team of other doctors could be quickly organised to ensure your travel safety. Furthermore, as I understand you only travel first class, I’ll happily pay for your tickets. Please let me know.

‘Well played, Dr Richard Sallie,’ they said on social media. ‘Well played.’

The online tabloid Daily Mail Australia had a field day, sending a paparazzo to the Piazza Navona to catch the Cardinal munching on a fried steak and chips, washing it down with a pint of lager and accompanying it with a generous bread basket. ‘Heart condition improving then, George?’ said the headline.

As it happened, the eventual cost to the Royal Commission (and therefore, the Australian taxpayer) of the eleventh-hour determination that the Cardinal was simply too ill to fly is estimated to be in the region of $250 000.

Survivor Peter Blenkiron was sitting in court that day, and he says his first response was black humour. ‘I knew if I didn’t laugh, I would have cried,’ Blenkiron says. But as he left the court, Blenkiron, a very mild-mannered and pleasant fellow, felt the rage start to rise in him. ‘What sort of condition was it where he was still able to work?’ Blenkiron wondered. ‘I just thought, “This does not make sense. This does not have a ring of truth.”’

It was not publicly known at this point, but eight days before Pell’s solicitors sent the medical letter to the Royal Commission, a raid had taken place. A raid by detectives of Victoria Police’s Taskforce SANO, which investigated institutional abuse cases. The detectives went to St Patrick’s Cathedral, St Kevin’s College in Toorak and ‘other properties believed to be linked to the Church’. /Victoria Police later confirmed to The Age that the offences related to 14-year-old boys in the cathedral. The detectives told the newspaper that they wanted to speak to ‘victims or anybody with any information relating to any alleged sexual assaults at the cathedral between 1996 and 2001’. Those years just happened to correspond with the years of Pell’s tenure as Archbishop of Melbourne. The article also made a point of saying that the Church’s buildings in East Melbourne also housed Caritas Australia and the Cardinal Knox Centre (the archdiocese’s administrative offices). Caritas, of course, being Pell’s workplace for some years in the 1980s.

Pell was not named in the article. But given that it was the seat of power of perhaps his closest friend in the Church, Denis Hart, and that, more generally, it would have caused quite a stir among staff that the detectives had turned the place upside down, it is within the realms of possibility that news may have travelled back by some method or another to Pell by 10 December that something was afoot. There are those in the criminal justice fraternity who are absolutely convinced that it did. The detectives, of course, were looking for information about Pell himself. They were looking for something, anything, that might shed light on a complaint about Pell during those years. They were searching for clues about Pell and The Kid and The Choirboy. When Pell made his announcement that he wasn’t to fly, it took twelve days for the carefully worded article in The Age to surface. It had an official comment from a Police Media operative. It was clear that the cops wanted Pell to know they were circling. And as I have interviewed a number of complainants who allege child abuse by Pell, everyone involved with that investigation was absolutely gutted when he didn’t come back.

The tide of public opinion crashed against the Cardinal like a monster wave. Like Blenkiron, the other survivors and families of Ballarat and Melbourne who had been waiting to eyeball the Cardinal during his evidence were incandescent. They determined that somehow or other, they would get to Rome.

Comedian and composer Tim Minchin released an absurdly catchy charity song, ‘Come Home (Cardinal Pell)’. I remember the first time I heard it and gasping as the audacity increased with each verse. The initial lines are innocuous enough—‘Come home, Cardinal Pell, come down from your citadel, it’s just the right thing to do, we have a right to know what you knew’. But then it builds in intensity—hurling insult after insult at Pell: ‘You spent year after year, working hard to protect the Church’s assets, I mean, with all due respect, dude, I think you’re scum!’ It gets worse—Pell is called a ‘pompous buffoon’, tarred with ‘ethical hypocrisy’ and ‘intellectual vacuity’. ‘And your arrogance don’t bother me as much as the fact you turned out to be such a goddamn coward. You’re a coward Georgie. You’re a coward Georgie.’

Perhaps the most brazen bit—the bit where he plays Pell at what so many say is his own bullying game—is at the end, where Minchin gives a metaphorical two-fingered salute, taunting the Cardinal to come home and sue him if he doesn’t like it.

‘Oh, Cardinal Pell, my lawyer just rang me to tell me this song could get me in legal trouble. Oh well, Cardinal Pell. If you don’t feel compelled to come home by a sense of moral duty, perhaps you will come home and fricking sue me.’ The song was played on the Network Ten program The Project, and a website set up by Ballarat local and The Project presenter Gorgi Coghlan and comedian Meshel Laurie. It raised just shy of $200 000 in four days. The proceeds left over from funding the survivors’ trip to Rome were given to Ballarat’s Centre Against Sexual Assault—which has always done a brisk trade in the abuse-scarred town. The Project’s co-host Steve Price thought the song was disgraceful. ‘I think it is really disgusting the way he has resorted to personal abuse of George Pell,’ Price said. ‘This guy is a Cardinal, regardless of what you make of it … To use your talent to simply abuse someone from a distance, I think it’s pathetic.’ Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, who would go on to be granted an exclusive interview with Pell, said Minchin was ‘desperately unfair and cruel’ and ‘bases his case for the damnation of Pell on one untruth after another’. He was, said Bolt, ‘a man of no real intellectual integrity or moral courage’. While the song was a huge hit, in some ways it could be said that its coarse qualities played into Pell’s hands—that it gave him the moral high ground, made him look like a victim.

Two dozen survivors ultimately flew to Rome to hear the Cardinal’s evidence. It became a massive international media event. The survivors were interviewed by news organisations across the world. As Blenkiron, who was one of them, says, ironically, the Cardinal’s decision not to fly was ‘in hindsight, the best choice he could have made’. It turned enormous international attention to their cause, helped by the fact that the film Spotlight, about The Boston Globe’s investigation of the cover-up of clergy child abuse in its own city, had just been released. ‘And if that’s what it takes to keep children protected and no communities like ours destroyed in the future,’ Blenkiron says, ‘then it was worth it.’

Blenkiron noticed, however, something surprising about the man declared to be in such perilous health, when he met the Cardinal at the close of his evidence: his handshake. ‘I was shocked by how strong he was for a man of his age,’ Blenkiron says. ‘I’m 90 kilograms and he almost took me off my feet.’

The Cardinal was to give his evidence in the Quirinale’s Giuseppe Verdi room, a vast parqueted space, named after the Italian composer of operatic classics such as the ‘Triumphal March’ from Aida. As it transpired, the Cardinal’s evidence was to be far from a triumph.

When Pell walked with his familiar stooped gait into the Giuseppe Verdi room, filled with Blenkiron and his fellow travellers, another survivor, Paul Levey, says the star witness did not make eye contact with them once. Instead, Pell sat with a gaze glued on the monitor of the videolink screen for a good ten minutes while Royal Commission staff organised the feed.

Having sworn on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, ‘so help me God’, he rebuffed any suggestion that he was the number three man in the Vatican, a common and clearly tiresome misconception. ‘People like to make hypothetical lists,’ Pell shrugged. ‘Some people would see the financial affairs of the Vatican as very low on the list.’

Not he, though. Goodness, no. It is highly unlikely that Pell himself ever saw himself or his title as low on anyone’s list, anywhere. He was ‘something equivalent to the Treasurer’. He had walked into that building surrounded by an entourage and bodyguards. The bodyguards sat in the room where he was to give his evidence, flanking the survivors, wearing suits and earpieces like they were guarding an American president.

‘I think it’s very important that Church money is used efficiently, that the donations are used for the running of the Church, and for the helping of the poor, that they’re not wasted,’ the Cardinal declared.

Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission that day, beamed from Governor Macquarie Tower in Sydney back to the Hotel Quirinale, was Gail Furness, SC. A flinty, blonde barrister, Furness possesses a dry, whip-smart intelligence that creeps up on the witness slowly and seemingly innocuously, then wallops him over the head without warning. Then it bashes and bashes and bashes. Beating the unsuspecting witness to a bloodied pulp. ‘She’s not exactly what you’d call a people person,’ someone who works around the Royal Commission told me. ‘But she’s bloody good at her job.’

This first day started maddeningly slowly. But Furness was building her case.

Furness asked Pell if he or those he reported to in the Vatican had thought to set aside funds for victims of abuse when dioceses had run out of money. In a word: no.

‘As a preliminary clarification, my authority touches only the Vatican. Unlike most other Vatican councils or congregations, that is, departments, they have some sort of authority around the world.’ That is, whatever money flowed into the Vatican, whatever money it had collected over centuries through prudent financial and real estate decisions, would not flow out.

When Furness asked what might happen in the event of there being insufficient funds, where the people who were seeking to be compensated would go, the Cardinal replied that he wasn’t sure ‘we’ve ever been in that situation’.

‘And the Vatican,’ offered Furness, ‘as you see it, doesn’t have a role?’

‘No.’

Gail Furness brought up the inquiries around the world, which had focused on clergy abuse and exposed the inaction of the senior clergy.

The Cardinal paused slightly and leaned in towards the microphone. ‘Let me just say this as an initial clarification, and that is, I’m not here to defend the indefensible. The Church has made enormous mistakes and is working to remedy those, but the Church in many places, certainly in Australia, has mucked things up, has made … let people down.’

Mucked things up. The survivors gasped for the first time. Mucked things up?

‘Unfortunately, original sin is alive and well; the tendency to evil in the Catholic Church too, and sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, for good or for ill the Church follows the patterns of the societies in which it lives.’

‘So you wouldn’t suggest that it’s just a case of a few bad apples, as it were, within the Church?’ Furness asked.

‘I’ve never suggested that,’ the Cardinal replied.

‘And you wouldn’t think that it’s the case of a few weak or inactive leaders in the Church?’

‘No, unfortunately, they weren’t necessarily few.’

This was clearly a more conciliatory tone than Pell had previously adopted. The survivors felt quite heartened. Perhaps there would be more admissions. However, the Cardinal refused to admit that the problems were structural. ‘I think the faults overwhelmingly have been more personal faults, personal failures, rather than structures.’ With 1880 accused perpetrators over sixty years, and most of them never brought to justice by the Church, that’s one truckload of personal failures.

Continuing in his conciliatory tone, he also admitted that the Melbourne Response and Towards Healing ‘have been shown to be imperfect’ and added that he would like to see a national redress scheme—something that victims are desperate for.

Furness brought the Cardinal to his return to Australia after his education at Oxford—when he went back to Ballarat.

‘It seems that education and the education of children became an area of particular interest to you?’ Furness asked.

‘The Bishop asked me to take a role in that area and I did so happily,’ the Cardinal replied. The role was Episcopal Vicar for Education.

Here, Furness began subtly to sharpen her knives. She cited a letter in 1984 from Pell to Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, in which Pell wrote that he was part of ‘the essential link between the Bishop, priests, parents, teachers and students’.

Furness asked, ‘Now, that is how you saw the role, isn’t it?’

To which Pell responded, ‘I would be very interested to see where I said that; I think it somewhat overstates my role, it was not the director of education.’

Furness showed him the document, dated 20 September 1984, where he addressed ‘My Lord’—Mulkearns—on ‘some thoughts on the role of the Episcopal Vicar for Education’ ‘the bishop’s representative in all areas of education’. ‘Through this clerical/religious presence education is seen as one vital part of the church’s apostolate; the essential link between Bishop, parents, teachers and students is also emphasised.’

Despite being one part of this ‘essential link’, Pell said he only ‘very rarely’ visited diocesan schools.

‘Perhaps more the opening, the blessing of a wing or an extension,’ Pell explained. ‘I had no regular such role because I was a full-time academic in the Institute of Catholic Education.’ This is certainly not the recollection of students at St Alipius, from Villa Maria, from St Patrick’s College, where almost every one I have spoken to knew who Pell was when they were a child at school and said Pell was a fairly regular visitor.

Furness asked if, as part of his role, any teacher, parent, principal or child approached him about problems at their school. The Cardinal replied that they did. She asked if the problems were in relation to teachers being ‘overly affectionate or in some way touching’ students.

‘Well, it’s a long time ago, but I can’t remember such complaints, and normally they would have been addressed to the Education Office, not to the Vicar … I can’t remember any such, ah, examples, but my memory might be playing me false, I –,’ he stopped short and looked at the screen.

Furness went in: ‘Why might your memory be playing you false?’

The Cardinal clasped his hands: ‘Because I don’t have perfect recall.’

The steel-trap mind was at play here: ‘Cardinal, I was just repeating what you said in different language; what you said was “I can’t remember any such examples but my memory may be playing me false”. That’s the answer you give?’

‘That is the answer. No more and no less,’ Pell responded.

Reflecting on this during an interview I had with him later on that night, a tired Andrew Collins, who had been watching this exchange in the Quirinale, was sceptical.

‘I mean, he’s a very, very intelligent man. Very smart man. He doesn’t strike as the sort of person who would have his head in the sand over these things.

‘So I do find it unbelievable that he didn’t know. I would probably find it more believable that he may not have wanted to know,’ Collins said. ‘But he would have had to have known, I’m sure of it.’

Furness took the Cardinal to some of his previous publicly reported statements on his time in the Diocese of Ballarat. For instance, that the general attitude of the Church to disclosures of sexual abuse was ‘generally not to believe the child’—did he accept that?

He did not accept that. He qualified it. ‘I think that, no, I that, I would now say that that is an overstatement, but it certainly was much, much more difficult for the child to be believed then.’ Furness asked if the predisposition was to be ‘dismissive of those complaints’.

‘If they were not presented clearly,’ Pell replied. ‘Too many of them certainly were dismissed and sometimes they were dismissed in absolutely scandalous circumstances … Very, very plausible allegations made by responsible people … were not followed up sufficiently.’

Furness wondered whether this was about asset protection, but Pell countered that it was about shame. ‘The instinct was more to protect the institution, the community of the Church, from shame.’ But he admitted that asset protection ‘did’ become an issue later on.

The Cardinal did agree that the culture was to not report to police. And to think that offenders could be treated, to ‘overestimate what could be done through psychological and psychiatric treatment’.

Here, without warning, Furness went in for the kill. ‘It’s the case, isn’t it, that you were aware during the 1970s and early 1980s, that the Bishop was sending [Ridsdale] off for treatment for sexual offending against children?’ Gerald Ridsdale is, of course, the former Catholic priest of the Ballarat Diocese who is thought to be Australia’s worst serial paedophile. The Royal Commission had seventy-eight formal claims against him for child abuse when it did a data analysis in 2015. In April 2017, he pleaded guilty to a further 20 charges against eleven children. But the numbers of victims are thought to in reality go into the hundreds. Pell wasn’t biting at the suggestion that he knew that his former Bishop, Ronald Mulkearns, was sending Ridsdale to counsellors, then on to the next parish, instead of sending him to police.

‘No, that’s certainly not correct … I wasn’t aware of Mulkearns sending anyone off for sexual offending,’ Pell said.

When Furness asked if he knew of anyone sent off for ‘sexual offending of any type’, Pell became archly definitional.

‘Well, an offence is, I presume, something against the law. If a priest is engaging in sexual behaviour, either heterosexually or homosexually, that’s incompatible with his continuing as a priest, and it’s possible that people were sent off—but once again, I’d have to hear who or what, say, to reply specifically.’

At this point, the Chair of the Commission for the first time showed a hint of frustration, which would become, in time, exasperation: ‘Cardinal, all that counsel is asking you for are the names of any priest you can remember who were sent off for treatment by Mulkearns, that’s all …’

‘It was long after I’d gone from the diocese, but Ridsdale was sent off for such treatment to the United States.’

Mulkearns had, of course, destroyed documents in relation to paedophile priests. Pell said that he only found out during Victoria’s parliamentary inquiry in 2014 that this had happened. ‘The way he was dealt with [it] was a catastrophe, a catastrophe for the victims and a catastrophe for the Church,’ the Cardinal said.

‘If effective action had been taken earlier, an enormous amount of suffering would have been avoided … He shifted—gave him chance after chance after chance, shifted him around, and initially at least trusted excessively in the possible benefits of psychological help.’

But the Cardinal was adamant that he was unaware at the time that this was taking place: ‘I did not know it at the time … I didn’t know that Mulkearns knew, let alone anybody else.’

When Pell commenced his priestly duties as an assistant priest at Swan Hill, he served under parish priest Bill Melican, who was to become very significant to the Royal Commission.

About 230 kilometres from Swan Hill, but with no significant towns in between, was the similarly isolated neighbouring parish of Mildura. It’s there that an incorrigible sex offender, Monsignor John Day, was abusing children with the protection, it’s now clear, of the local police. Pell remembered during his evidence that he knew of rumours and ‘gossip’ in regard to this. But Day had made denials of such behaviour. Day was later moved on by the Bishop when parishioners and some police confronted him. ‘I must say, in those days, if a priest denied such an activity, I was very strongly inclined to accept the denial,’ the Cardinal admitted to the Royal Commission.

Day was granted twelve months leave of absence on the guaranteed minimum salary. Then, in 1973, Mulkearns appointed him to the tiny Western District dairy town of Timboon. ‘Yes, I am critical of it,’ Pell told the Royal Commission. Day died in 1978, leaving a swathe of victims in his wake. Mulkearns gave him a glowing homily, admitting only to his ‘flamboyant’ ways.

In 1973, Pell of course moved on to St Alipius, another parish notorious for its child abuse. Ridsdale was at one time parish priest at St Alipius, where he famously lived for a period in the presbytery with Pell, as well as a string of other young priests, including Father Paul Bongiorno, who would later become a political editor for Channel Ten news.

The ring of paedophile Christian brothers at St Alipius beat, stalked and abused the children. They favoured nude bike riding, skinny-dipping at Lake Bungaree, kisses for the boys on the lips. They’d sit the children on their knees and stroke their hair at one moment, belt the living daylights out of them the next. And that was just the supposedly innocuous stuff. A whole generation of Ballarat kids was affected by what went on at St Alipius. So Furness was curious to know what Pell knew, and how much involvement he had with the school, in his Episcopal Vicar role.

‘Almost nothing,’ Pell replied. The St Alipius school is right next to the St Alipius parish where Pell was required to say mass. The presbytery where Pell lived is on one side of the church, the school, a stone’s throw away, on the other. The buildings are in very close proximity. And Pell admitted he did know all the brothers who worked there.

Did anyone complain about any of these brothers? ‘There was talk about the eccentricity of Brother, is it Fitzgerald? … But there were no specific accusations … I think he used to—it’s alleged he’d—when some of the boys were leaving he’d give them a kiss. He was very strange, old-fashioned, but a good teacher; there were things like that.’

‘At the time, did you see him kissing the children as sexualised behaviour?’ Furness asked him.

‘No, it was common knowledge, and the general conviction was, it was harmless enough … People were aware of it and they weren’t insisting that anything be done.’

Pell estimated the first time he heard there were problems with Brother Ted Dowlan was the early 1970s—the problems were at St Patrick’s College, up the road on Sturt Street.

‘What sort of problems?’ Furness asked.

‘Unspecified,’ Pell replied, ‘but harsh discipline and possibly other infractions too.’ When pushed, he admitted that ‘other infractions’ were problems of a sexual nature.

Father Lawrence O’Toole, a friend of Pell’s who was also an assistant priest of St Alipius in the seventies, says he knew of ‘sexualised conduct’ by the Christian Brothers at the school.

‘He didn’t mention that to me,’ Pell assured the Royal Commission.

O’Toole also gave evidence that a monsignor who had been on the Bishop’s consultors’ committee, which Pell later joined, and whom Pell knew, had had parents speak to him about another Christian Brother at the school ‘exposing himself to a child’. ‘Did that come to your attention?’

‘No.’

He’d heard about the nude bike riding, the skinny-dipping and ‘one or two fleeting references’ to ‘misbehaviour which I concluded might have been paedophiliac’ by Dowlan.

Survivor Tim Green, who gave evidence to the Royal Commission that he told Pell of Dowlan’s behaviour when Green saw Pell in the change rooms at the Eureka Pool in 1974, said he found it ‘inconceivable that none of the Brothers, lay teachers, the nurse, or even some of the parents knew about the abuse by Dowlan. It was just so blatantly obvious and every boy in the class knew that their turn was going to come up at some stage.’ That sentiment has been echoed by every St Patrick’s alumnus from that period whom I have spoken to—including several whose names I plucked from yearbooks and who are professionals who have never ‘come out’ as survivors of Dowlan.

Pell says his information came to him from ‘a St Pat’s boy … A fellow at the school. Yes, one that I remember,’ he said, adding that he still knew the boy’s name.

‘He recollected it years later, but I remembered him as a good and honest lad and I didn’t think he’d be telling—I couldn’t remember the actual incident, but I didn’t think he’d be telling lies.’ Pell later said, in his second, headline-making PR failure, that the boy ‘wasn’t asking me to do anything about it’.

Pell agreed with Furness that the evidence showed that there were students, more than one teacher, the principal of St Paul’s Technical School, parents and probably Mulkearns who knew of the goings-on at St Patrick’s College.

‘You’d agree, would you, that the knowledge of the sexual offending by Christian Brothers at St Alipius School and St Pat’s School was known by a significant number in the community; would you agree with that?’ Furness asked Pell.

‘I would agree that it was known to all the people whom you’ve mentioned and they do constitute a significant number.’ But as to the Episcopal Vicar for Education? Well, he heard nary a whisper.

He heard nothing when Brother Paul Nangle, the headmaster of St Patrick’s, went to see Mulkearns because he saw a brother in bed with two boarders. Nangle also went to see the Christian Brothers’ Provincial, Brother Patrick Naughtin, and the Provincial took the offending brother out of the college and informed Mulkearns.

He heard zilch about Ridsdale from Swan Hill, Pell’s first parish, even though there had been just one assistant priest between Ridsdale’s and Pell’s placements there. As the next few days were to show, there was so much that Pell didn’t know. Despite being in so many places where he might find out.