MORTLAKE
Cardinal George Pell: Because something is wrong, you can’t wave a magic wand and correct the situation easily in every situation.
Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission, Gail Furness, SC: You don’t need a magic wand; you just need a group of adults who are responsible, don’t you?
Royal Commission, March 2016
Incongruously, the approach to the town of Mortlake along the Hamilton Highway, in the middle of far-western Victoria, begins with an Avenue of Honour. The Monterey cypresses were planted for the fallen soldiers after the Great War, and now provide a thick canopy with patches of sunlight glinting through. ‘Mortlake: Australia’s Olivine Capital,’ a peeling sign declares, bearing a picture of a peridot, the gemstone that olivine becomes. Every country town has to be capital of something. For Mortlake, it’s a rock-forming mineral and, though not advertised on the roadside, for a short but bleak period at the start of the 1980s, clergy abuse. The town is flat and empty. On the Friday when I drive through on the way to the coast, not a single soul is to be seen and scarcely a car is on the road. Crows swoop over unlovely buildings. Mortlake is where Father Gerald Ridsdale did some of his worst work. If what went on with Donna Cushing and her siblings at Edenhope was a tragedy, what went on at Mortlake was an annihilation. And by this stage, it was becoming increasingly implausible that the consultors of Ballarat’s Bishop, including Pell, didn’t know what was going on.
Anyone with knowledge of what went on in the Ballarat Diocese shudders at the thought of Mortlake, where the Royal Commission has heard Ridsdale abused every boy he could lay his hands on at the local school, St Colman’s. It happened at sleepovers. In his pool room. In his bedroom at the presbytery. At the school. Dr Wayne Chamley, from the advocacy group Broken Rites, tells me it devastated the community. ‘Mortlake imploded over the Ridsdale saga,’ Chamley says. ‘Sons fought fathers because the fathers didn’t believe the sons had been abused. The whole family networks just started tearing themselves apart because of what had happened: the shocking tragedy in that town.’ Royal Commission statistics released in 2015 showed seven men from Mortlake had made official claims of child sexual abuse. That’s more than 20 per cent of the boys at the tiny school who made a claim against Ridsdale.
But they were just the ones who claimed. Evidence to the Royal Commission from survivors, parents, teachers, clerics and the nun who was school principal suggest far more than seven were abused. Internal Church documents suggest every boy in one class was affected. Another parishioner said none of the altar boys went unscathed. ‘A stream of parents [came] and [said] this had happened,’ the principal, Sister Kate McGrath, told a Catholic Church Insurance loss assessor.
‘How many boys would you have had in [Grade] 5 and 6, roughly?’ asked the loss assessor in 1993 in the lead-up to Ridsdale’s first criminal trial.
‘I suppose twelve or fourteen,’ McGrath replied.
‘Do you think they could have all been molested to some extent?’
‘The possibility is certainly there, yes.’
‘How many would be in Grade 7 and 8, boys?’
‘Fewer there, perhaps between the two classes, there would have been eight or ten …’
‘A lot of children to have been affected by one man, isn’t it?’
‘Well the school was only something like sixty-eight children. If you took half of those boys that’s thirty. I think I added it up at one stage and it was a possibility of twenty of them having been molested.’
In another CCI interview in 1993, Ridsdale himself admitted that he ‘went haywire there. Altar boys, mainly. They came over to the presbytery.’
‘It was no secret around Mortlake eventually about me and my behaviour; there was talk all around the place,’ he said.
Mortlake is an instructive case study in just how badly things went in the Ballarat Diocese during those grim years that Ronald Mulkearns was Bishop and Pell was, among others, one of his priestly consultors. Ann Ryan was a teacher at St Colman’s who became painfully aware of the extent of the problem, and the scale of the ensuing cover-up. I met her in July 2015 at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne. We chatted as we both walked through its grey grounds on a freezing day. I’d looked up every Ann Ryan in western Victoria (not surprisingly, in those Irish Catholic towns, there are many) and when I stumbled upon her in the phone book, she said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve found me’. Ryan is profoundly disturbed by what happened to the children in that little town and how terribly it was handled. And she had a bad feeling about Ridsdale from the start.
‘He had a very strutting style when he came amongst us,’ she told me. ‘And I just, well, no, I just didn’t like him. Couldn’t put my finger on it, but didn’t like him.’ Teaching the boys at the school, she began to notice a change in their behaviour—petulance and an over-curiosity about matters sexual. A part-time librarian as well as teacher, she noticed much giggling behind hands, lads looking up sexual terms in the Funk and Wagnalls. All of a sudden Ridsdale was removed. Ladies were asked to bring a plate for his hastily organised leaving do. Ryan did not know the reason why, until several weeks later when a parishioner told her after mass that he had been ‘interfering with boys’. Ryan was gobsmacked. A few weeks later, the impressively brazen Ridsdale returned for the school fete and Ryan noticed many parishioners who had been his friends were now shunning him.
Part of the reason Ridsdale had been found out was because McGrath was told by parents that Ridsdale was abusing their children. That same day, she arranged for another nun, Sister Patricia Vagg, to inform Mulkearns. Ridsdale was removed almost immediately. But Mulkearns didn’t tell police. He also failed to provide any assistance for the child victims. Documents tendered to the Royal Commission show that McGrath tried to arrange counselling for the families:
Some of the parents wished to hold a meeting. The bishop said ‘no’, there was to be no meeting. I asked that something be done for those children and to the best of my memory the response was that we could do nothing for the children.
Ryan says in recent years she’s had conversations with McGrath about that, and McGrath said that Mulkearns told her ‘that would be admitting guilt, to do anything for the children or to do anything at all’. When I asked Ryan what she thought of that, she paused and drew breath: ‘Horror … Yeah. It’s just a totally inhumane response.’
Seven years after Ridsdale left, another parishioner dissolved in tears and told Ryan that her son had been badly sexually abused by Ridsdale. Ryan decided to write to Mulkearns. She brought those letters to St Patrick’s to show me. She rolled her eyes reading them in 2015—at the copperplate waffling, the simpering tone towards the Bishop: ‘I must say how terrific it is to see you at our Diocesan Pastoral Planning meetings’, ‘Yours sincerely in the work of Jesus’, etc. But when she gets to the point, Ryan makes it abundantly clear that the children’s safety had been severely compromised.
Some years back (1980–81) some very unfortunate happenings took place between the parish priest of the time and some young schoolboys … Both horrified and sickened, I was stunned into a state of shock as were many others, including parents of those concerned. For years now, the fact that this happened in our parish and was virtually swept under the carpet has concerned me … Some might say ‘let sleeping dogs lie’, but would Jesus? And are the ‘sleeping dogs’ at peace?
The Bishop’s response, tapped out on the diocesan typewriter, left her stunned:
I am sure that you will appreciate that it is simply not possible to enter into correspondence in any detail concerning the matters to which you allude. I assure you of my own concern for all members of the diocesan community. However, it is difficult to reach out to specific people when one hears only vague rumours of a very general kind.
Ryan could not believe the dismissive tone of the letter. She simply shook her head when I told her that at that very time, 1989, as he wrote that he could not do anything about these ‘vague rumours’, Mulkearns was sending Ridsdale to New Mexico for ‘treatment’ for his paedophilia.
‘I had no idea. Absolutely no idea,’ she said. She sent four letters in all, to no avail.
Finally, Mulkearns turned up a few months later to Mortlake to officiate a sacrament. Ryan and one of the victim’s mothers marched up to the presbytery after the service to see the Bishop. The parish priest who came to the door said the Bishop declined their request. Ryan kept up her letter-writing campaign to Mulkearns and to other priests in the diocese for many years. Her job was threatened by a later principal at St Colman’s and the parish priest. The message was, essentially, to shut up about the abuse. She lost her faith entirely due to the cover-up and she says she’ll never go back to the Church.
Paul Levey lived at Mortlake, although not really of his own choosing. Ridsdale actually met him through Levey’s Irish-Catholic mother, when the priest was at one of his many postings—the National Pastoral Institute in Melbourne, before Ridsdale’s Mortlake stint. Levey is absolutely disparaging about Pell. And he doesn’t believe for a single second that Pell didn’t know around that time about him or what happened in that town. Ridsdale first abused Levey in the isolated far-western New South Wales mining town of White Cliffs, in 1980 when Levey was twelve, the same year his parents split up. Ridsdale discovered on a visit to Melbourne that Levey had been truanting. In fact, Levey now believes that his disengagement with school was because of the abuse he had already suffered.
But Ridsdale’s discovery of the truancy led to a decision, in 1982, by Levey’s father and Ridsdale. They cooked up a plan to send the boy to live with Ridsdale to bring him into line. In Easter that year, Levey went to live at the Mortlake parish presbytery with Ridsdale. Ridsdale essentially kept him prisoner. A little camp mattress was set up for the boy in the priest’s room.
‘He was sexually abused all the time, just about every day,’ Gail Furness told the Royal Commission as Pell’s second day of evidence wore on.
‘Yes, a terrible and sad story,’ Pell responded.
Levey describes that he always slept in Ridsdale’s room and that there was a housekeeper and always people coming and going, including people having parish meetings at the presbytery. He says it was common knowledge in Mortlake ‘that I lived at the presbytery’. ‘[I was introduced] to everybody that was there [at the presbytery]. We’d go out to different families around the place and I’d be introduced there and I’d be introduced at the school and the presbytery,’ Levey says, agreeing that those visitors to the presbytery included other Church officials who had meetings there.
He tells me he’d try to get away—making excuses to stay at other kids’ homes for sleepovers at any opportunity. He now feels guilty about the children he brought to the presbytery, in the hope that he would be spared a night of sexual abuse—knowing now that they, too, were abused by Ridsdale during those sleepovers. Ridsdale, meanwhile, would threaten him.
‘He’d say, “you’ll get thrown out of school, and your mum and dad don’t want you” or, “we need to keep this secret because no-one will like you”,’ Levey says. ‘He made out that I was consenting to it and later in life it’s something that I found very stressful and confusing—you know, you ask yourself, “Was I consenting to it?”’ No-one came to collect Levey. He remained with his priestly predator from Easter to Halloween. Ridsdale even requested that his mother send the family allowance she received from the government to him. She refused. Unbeknown to Levey at the time, his mother, Beverley, had tried to get him out several times, by calling Mulkearns.
‘I did not like the situation at all,’ Beverley Levey told the Royal Commission. ‘I was devastated because they had taken my son away.’ Beverley Levey called Mulkearns’ office repeatedly, and finally said she would not stop calling unless Mulkearns spoke to her.
‘When I finally spoke to Bishop Mulkearns, I said, “How can you let a child live in a presbytery with a priest? That’s not appropriate. I want Paul taken out of there.” Bishop Mulkearns said there was nothing he could do as Ridsdale had Paul’s father’s approval. He hung up on me.’
The last time she spoke to Mulkearns, she threatened to get the police involved if he didn’t do something about Paul and Ridsdale. Mulkearns hung up on her again. But Paul was moved out to a nearby Mortlake family. George Pell’s cousin, Monsignor Henry Nolan, had an active role in getting Levey out,
‘Bishop Mulkearns’ response here was nothing short of scandalous, wasn’t it?’ Furness asked Pell.
‘That is correct,’ replied the Cardinal.
Levey never told a soul about the abuse until the 1990s, when broadcaster Derryn Hinch ‘named and shamed’ Ridsdale as ‘the worst paedophile in Australia’. That’s when Levey told his dad, who accompanied him to the police station. At first, Beverley Levey wanted nothing to do with it—then a staunch Catholic, she thought he was bringing down the Church. But since she gave evidence in December 2015, and in Paul Levey’s words ‘watched all those priests get up there and lie’, she hasn’t been back to mass. After seventy-six years in the Church, the lies and obfuscations finally became too much for Beverley Levey.
The Church vigorously defended a civil action Levey took in the 1990s. A Church document written by Monsignor Glynn Murphy, who is at the time of writing a defence force chaplain but was then working for the Ballarat Diocese, gleefully discussed handing the writ over to the Melbourne Diocese ‘who will probably send it back to [solicitors] Blackburn, making them chase around a bit more!!’ The glib tone recalled some of the correspondence during the John Ellis case in Sydney, or the Fosters in Melbourne. The Church made Levey wait two years before it ultimately settled his case. During that process, he never received an apology, never had a meeting with Church officials, was never offered counselling.
Levey, who was in Rome with the other survivors as Pell gave evidence, was scandalised by what Pell had to say as he watched on. At times his head was buried in his hands, at others, on his wife’s shoulder. He managed to keep his cool, but only just.
‘I had to get up and walk out at one point when they were discussing me,’ Levey says. ‘I had to take a few deep breaths until I calmed down.’ When he returned to the room, he noticed that one of the Cardinal’s security guards had sat in the seat beside him.
‘I don’t know whether they thought I was going to punch him in the head, or what, but I wasn’t,’ Levey says. A worker from the Ballarat Centre Against Sexual Assault came and sat between Levey and the security man. ‘And I managed to control my temper.’
‘Paul has a lot of anger, a lot of justifiable anger, and he was very angry at the time,’ says his fellow survivor Andrew Collins.
‘Especially when he heard that stuff about him, he found it hard to remain composed. But he didn’t go off. He had the support of all of us around him. He didn’t jump up and make a scene.’
Supporter Vanessa Beetham, who runs a survivors-of-suicide group for the Ballarat community, was watching Levey and the other men struggle to maintain their composure and marvelled at their self-control.
‘I wish that every Australian could have seen those men in that room,’ Beetham says. ‘These men in that situation, the way they were so dignified, and so composed, are like, for me, the new folk heroes. So brave, so courageous.
‘The things that were being said by Pell, that they had to sit through, there were moments when I felt like I was going to jump across the room. And it’s unrelated to me. But for them to sit there with that dignity and composure. Amongst his bodyguards. Amazing.’
While Levey was still living with Ridsdale, Pell was director of Aquinas College and principal of the entire Institute of Catholic Education. He was living with the ailing retired Bishop of Ballarat James O’Collins, who also had knowledge of Ridsdale’s offending, but was sliding into advanced dementia. Pell agreed with Furness’ comment during his evidence that he would have thought a boy living in a presbytery ‘most unusual’.
‘It was imprudent,’ the Cardinal told the Royal Commission, ‘and even in the most innocent of relationships, it could have given rise to gossip.’ The Cardinal agreed that he had never heard of such a living arrangement and did not approve of it either.
So Furness asked him the obvious question: ‘If you had discovered that a 14-year-old child was living in a presbytery, you would have done what you could to take the child out, wouldn’t you?’
Pell’s answer was not precisely an affirmation. ‘Well before that I would certainly have wanted to know why the child was there and what precautions were in place and whether this was something that was temporary or permanent.’ The Cardinal agreed that if there had been complaints about Ridsdale of ‘a sexual nature before the child was placed in the presbytery’, he would never have put the child there.
Furness insisted that once he discovered that there was a child in the presbytery, ‘it would be wrong to do anything other than take the child out; isn’t that right?’
Pell agreed, but qualified: ‘If it was in my power to do so … I would do whatever was in my power in such a hypothetical situation.’
Furness at this point began to adopt a slightly disdainful tone. ‘It is not a question of power or authority or structural responsibility when it comes to children, Cardinal, is it?’
But for Pell, perhaps, yes it was—he said he believed we are ‘all surrounded by real constraints’ and even if a recommendation was made, sometimes it would be rejected. ‘Because something is wrong, you can’t wave a magic wand and correct the situation easily in every situation,’ he told Furness.
A hint of vexation again returned to the Counsel Assisting’s voice.
‘We are talking about the safety of children, Cardinal. Does that answer apply to the safety of children in the Church?’
The Cardinal paused for a few seconds. Then he leaned forward to the microphone. ‘Ah, ah of course it does. Everything practical must and should be done to provide for the moral and physical safety of children.’
‘You don’t need a magic wand; you just need a group of adults who are responsible, don’t you?’ Furness said.
But Pell would not bite. ‘I have explained that different people are able to do different things in different situations and what I am attempting to say is that nobody can do the impossible. Everybody has an obligation to do what they can to provide appropriate safety precautions.’
Furness was not minded to give up—she asked him whether in the 1970s and 1980s, the Ballarat Diocese, the Church ‘collectively failed to protect children’. But Pell sheeted it home, effectively, to Mulkearns, who was at the time of Pell’s evidence close to death: ‘Well, in the Diocese of Ballarat there—certainly was a gigantic failure of leadership.’
Furness said it was surely more than just leadership. ‘It was all parish priests, assistant priests, advisors, consultors who all collectively failed to protect children who were living and under the care of the Church in that diocese in the 1970s and 1980s?’
By this time Pell’s pugilistic instincts had well and truly kicked in—the ghost of heavyweight boxer George Pell Senior floated around the room: ‘I think that is a vast and misleading overstatement. It goes far beyond any evidence. Where there is evidence that people knew of misbehaviour, where they knew of a practical danger, they should have acted. We are not permitted to go beyond the evidence.’
Levey didn’t buy this for a second. ‘He had to have known—he was at those meetings,’ an emotional Levey said that night. ‘It was common knowledge the whole time I was at Mortlake that other clergy knew I was there. This has been the hardest part of it all so far.’
Pell’s thesis on all of this in his final submissions to the Royal Commission, and indeed any knowledge that he may have had in relation to Ridsdale’s movements and why they took place, is that there is not a scintilla of evidence, neither documentary nor spoken, to actively show that he had been told. It was rather convenient that those people proven to have known were either dead when the Royal Commission was sitting—his cousin and priest Henry Nolan and Monsignor Leo Fiscalini—or on their deathbed and completely discredited—Mulkearns (who ultimately did die in April 2016).
During the hearing, Furness pointed out to the Cardinal the ‘collective failure in the diocese’, which included parish priests, advisors and consultors who knew about Mortlake and Ridsdale, beyond just those three.
‘There was clear evidence that there was knowledge amongst all the people that you have mentioned,’ the Cardinal replied drily. ‘I am not aware of evidence that other people, other clergy, knew these things.’ He drew Furness’ attention to the difference between a universal failure and a collective failure. ‘For those who were ignorant, I think it is improper to impute responsibility to them.’
At this point, the relationship between Furness and Pell became positively arctic. It did not recover. ‘So any consultor who you say knew nothing has no responsibility, including moral responsibility, for what happened in the diocese in relation to Ridsdale; is that your view?’
Pell dropped all pretence of professional conviviality with his interlocutor. ‘That is stated very badly,’ he said, disdainfully, ‘but when there is ignorance, when the ignorance is not wilful, when the ignorance does not represent somebody not doing their authority, I can’t see that responsibility be imputed to them.’
Furness took her moment. ‘Is it the case, Cardinal, that all your answers over the last little while have been designed to exclude yourself, in your mind, from any responsibility in relation to Ridsdale and the Diocese of Ballarat?’ Everyone in the courtroom leaned forward.
‘My answers were designed to answer your questions accurately and completely.’
The survivors gathered in Rome and in Sydney had been waiting for some sense of ownership of the consultors’ failings, some admission that Pell accepted some responsibility, any responsibility, for Ridsdale being moved from parish to parish. But when Furness asked the Cardinal if he accepted any responsibility as a consultor, his reply was succinct: ‘No, I don’t.’
Getting back to Levey, Pell said he didn’t know that Levey, or any boy, was living at the presbytery at Mortlake. But other priests in the diocese did. Father Lawrence O’Toole gave evidence to the Royal Commission in December 2015 that he knew that Levey was living with Ridsdale at the time, when O’Toole was based half an hour away at Warrnambool. He said he didn’t think it was ‘discreet’, in fact he thought it was ‘dangerous … because it could lead to aberrations, sexual aberrations’.
O’Toole later went to zone meetings attended by some of Pell’s fellow consultors. But he claims he told neither them nor the Bishop. O’Toole knew Pell—he’d lived with him at the presbytery at Ballarat East in the 1970s. When Furness asked the Cardinal if they’d kept in touch after that when O’Toole moved to Warrnambool, the Cardinal replied ‘once or twice a year’.
While Pell said he had no recollection of O’Toole telling him there was a boy living in the presbytery, he did say he heard about it ‘plus or minus 1990’. When pressed on this point, Pell replied that he couldn’t recall precisely when he had heard about ‘the cohabitation’.
Several days later, at the close of Pell’s evidence, Levey was the only survivor in Rome who didn’t go to meet with the Cardinal. He was just too furious. This was despite the fact that he had been the first survivor who arranged to go to Rome after receiving a private donation from a benefactor and arranging beforehand with the Cardinal’s office to have a private meeting.
But the evidence he heard made Levey feel that any meeting with Pell was utterly futile. ‘It was just a media stunt,’ he said. An Australian Catholic official who was at the Quirinale at the time asked Levey why he wouldn’t be going to the meeting with the other survivors. ‘Why not? Because he is a fucking liar,’ Levey shot back.