ALL THE BISHOP OF BALLARAT’S MEN
Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.
The Porter in Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3
To examine what George Pell really knew during his time as a consultor of the Ballarat Diocese, you have to take a forensic look at the state of knowledge of those around him. One of the most instructive figures to examine is Brian Finnigan. At the time he gave his public evidence to the Royal Commission in December 2015, Finnigan was Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane. But for many years, Finnigan had been a priest in the Ballarat Diocese, and a friend of Pell’s, and although they haven’t seen each other for a few years, the Cardinal says they remain friends to this day. Finnigan was Bishop Ronald Mulkearns’ secretary. During those consultors’ meetings, Finnigan took the notes. Besides his public evidence in December 2015, Finnigan also gave evidence to the Royal Commission in a private hearing in July 2015. In that evidence, he made some shocking admissions—including that back in the 1970s, he and other priests didn’t consider things like touching boys’ penises, masturbating and even anally raping them as crimes.
Certainly a moral fault, I don’t know whether I’d consider them crimes, because one of the things that puzzles me about all of this matter that we are dealing with, is poor old Bishop Mulkearns gets, as it were, blamed for everything, it’s good to dump everything on him, but many policemen knew about this activity and they didn’t press charges or anything.
‘Poor old Bishop Mulkearns’, without whose dreadful inaction dozens of children in the Ballarat Diocese would not be victims of Ridsdale. Paul Levey and the Harrison kids to name but five.
Finnigan knew that young Levey lived with Ridsdale at the presbytery at Mortlake. When asked if he thought it untoward that a priest had a child bunking in his living quarters, Finnigan replied that it was ‘a bit unusual, but not unusual’, adding that a priest had recently had approval for a relation to stay in his presbytery.
‘This isn’t a relation, this is a young boy staying at the presbytery,’ Furness snapped back, ‘ … The rational explanation is that you were blind and naïve and stupid in those days, is that it?’
‘If you want to put it that way, yes.’
When Furness asked Pell if Finnigan ‘at any time’ told him that he knew there was a boy at the presbytery, Pell replied, ‘I don’t recall him doing so’. And when asked if it was brought to his attention by Mulkearns or O’Toole, Pell replied, ‘I don’t think so’.
Some of those watching believed answers like this—which dominated Pell’s evidence as well as Finnigan’s and many of the other priests—to be a form of ‘mental reservation’, or mentalis restrictio in the Latin. It’s a theological strategy dating back centuries, which involves the idea of truths ‘expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind’. As the theory goes, lying is considered a sin. But a Christian’s ethical duty is to tell truth to God—reserving or restricting part of that truth from human ears is ethically sound if it serves the greater good.
An oft-cited hypothetical example of mental reservation is the priest who hides Jews from the Nazis and when the Gestapo comes to the door and asks if there are Jews in the house, the priest replies, ‘they are not here’ and in his mind silently says ‘for you Nazis’. Therefore, he has not lied to God and has done a noble thing.
Strict mental reservation permits what is essentially a spoken untruth if the liar is telling their truth to God; the untruth to man is told for the greater good. But Catholic theology has shunned that for centuries. The jury is out, however, on so-called ‘wide’ mental reservation, that permits an ambiguity, as opposed to an outright lie, if the ambiguity is resolved to God in the speaker’s mind and if it is done for the greater good. It is only supposed to be permitted in life or death scenarios. However, internationally, there have been situations where it appears to have been used by priests and bishops who have covered up child abuse—that is, for the greater good of the Church. The landmark Murphy Report in 2009 into sexual abuse in Ireland’s Dublin Diocese called out the practice. The report quotes Dublin Archbishop Desmond Connell as saying:
Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be—permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying. It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer. Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So, mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying.
In one example heard in the Murphy Report, the Irish Church issued a press release saying it had cooperated with the police in dealing with a paedophile priest, but when the victim’s advocate inquired more fully, the archdiocese’s explanation was ‘we never said we cooperated fully’ with an emphasis placed on the word ‘fully’.
When viewed through this prism, many who observed the answers given by Ballarat priests including Pell to the Australian Royal Commission wondered if they did not include some form of mental reservation: ‘I don’t think so’, ‘I don’t recall’, ‘no-one mentioned paedophilia’—answers sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy the wide mental reservation definition if the person uttering them was telling their truth to their God. Certainly, Ballarat survivors Andrew Collins and Peter Blenkiron believe that Pell was employing the strategy.
American canon lawyer Tom Doyle told the Royal Commission in February 2017 that canon law had been used ‘by ecclesiastical authorities for not proceeding in taking direct action against reports of sexual abuse’. ‘It has been used as an excuse for not reporting to civil authorities, and it has been used as an excuse for allowing accused clerics to continue in ministry,’ Doyle said.
Kieran Tapsell, a former NSW District Court judge, seminarian and writer on canon law, says that in the Church when there is a conflict between canon law and civil law, canon law prevails. He says that until 2001, canon law had a 5-year limitation period on sexual abuse claims by children, meaning they disappeared after five years. This is problematic, given the Commission has heard that the average time to report a crime is thirty-three years.
In a report to the Commission, Tapsell also elaborates at length about something called the Pontifical Secret or Secreta Continere. Its origins were in 1922, when Pope Pius XI issued his decree Crimen Sollicitationis, which created a ‘privilege of clergy’—meaning that any information obtained through canonical investigations of issues like child abuse by priests be protected by ‘the secret of the Holy Office’. Tapsell writes that the Pontifical Secret was crystallised in 1974 on ‘extrajudicial denunciations’ and the ‘process and decision’ involving child sexual abuse. The secrecy was extended to the allegation itself. It requires that all who participate in cases to which it applies ‘should observe the strictest secrecy, the secrecy of the Holy Office’. ‘The observance of the pontifical secret,’ Tapsell writes, ‘made the requirements of mandatory reporting [of sexual abuse of minors] and the need for the healing of the victim more difficult. Indeed, the observance of the pontifical secret can be seen from the worldwide pattern of cover up and its consequences.’ The existence of the Pontifical Secret is why the architects of Towards Healing, including Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, encouraged complainants to report the abuse to civil authorities—including police. Because once the Bishop got involved, the cover-up began.
The Pontifical Secret might go some way to explain the actions of Mulkearns. Mulkearns has been crucified in the media (for good reason) for his cover-ups and has been appointed, along with Archbishop Frank Little, Scapegoat-in-Chief. There is no question he did this. There is no question that his actions and inactions were unspeakably bad. So it surprised me to learn from many of his fellow priests who happen to be good people that there was another side to him—a gentler, decent side. Even after Pell had dumped on him royally in the Royal Commission, Pell later admitted to Andrew Bolt, ‘I think he just got caught deeper and deeper and deeper and I suspect, eventually, was like an animal caught in the headlights of a car, he was trapped … I can’t give any coherent reason for it’.
Former Corpus Christi seminarian Michael Costigan remained friends with Mulkearns until the former Bishop of Ballarat’s death in April 2016, and feels that in some sectors, Mulkearns was improperly vilified—with Pell the supposed hero in his handling of child sexual abuse claims and Mulkearns the villain. Costigan said there was no defending what Mulkearns did, but questioned whether there was so much distance between him and others in the Church at the time.
I question Costigan on this vigorously—I know too many people who would not have had their childhoods blighted were it not for Mulkearns’ cover-up. Costigan offers the explanation that Mulkearns had a ‘blind devotion to the papacy and to Rome’. Mulkearns, like Costigan, was a canon lawyer. ‘If Rome told him to act in a certain way, he believed there was no alternative—it was almost a juvenile reaction,’ Costigan says. Costigan spoke with Mulkearns regularly right up until the former Bishop’s death and makes an admission, never before made publicly: that Mulkearns confessed to him that he ‘honestly did not know what to do’ about Ridsdale. ‘He did not know how to handle it,’ Costigan says.
It culminated, Costigan says, with what’s known as an ad limina visit, where bishops visit the Vatican for an audience with the Pope. Mulkearns appealed to Pope John Paul II about what to do about child sexual abuse—he wanted, says Costigan, ‘some direction or counselling’. ‘He said the Pope would not talk to him about it,’ Costigan says. ‘He said the Pope turned his back and walked out of the room.’
Costigan says Mulkearns felt completely at sea and the exchange radically altered his opinion of the Pope. ‘It wasn’t long after he came back that he stood down as Bishop,’ Costigan says.
There was, of course, no need for pontifical secrets or mentalis restrictio when, back in April 1993, Finnigan, who was then Vicar-General of the Ballarat Diocese, was interviewed by a loss adjustor for Catholic Church Insurance, in the lead-up to Ridsdale’s first trial. This was a secret conversation which Finnigan thought would never again see the light of day.
But tellingly, CCI later refused to insure the Church for any abuse committed by Ridsdale after 1975, because of the knowledge the diocese had from Ridsdale’s time at Inglewood. In the interview with Finnigan, the insurer was ‘very concerned’ about what had occurred in Mortlake. Finnigan indicated his knowledge of events there.
‘All this is very confidential,’ Finnigan began, ‘but one of the subsequent [parish priests] at Mortlake would say that Mortlake is one of the real trouble spots and whether he is given to a bit of dramatisation … All kids in a couple of classes …’
Finnigan went on to point out that a colleague or relative of his was a parishioner there and ‘his son was certainly molested’. Finnigan told the loss adjustor that at the time he was the Bishop’s secretary, while Ridsdale was at Mortlake in 1981 and 1982, ‘three or four people’ had come to him to complain about Ridsdale—who was inviting ‘lads around to his place’ and was ‘overly friendly’.
‘I confronted Gerald Ridsdale and I must say it was a very hard thing to do in the sense that he was most crestfallen. He said, “I thought I was going along very well”.’
Finnigan then wrote to Ridsdale to tell him that the loss adjustor needed to see him about writs, where complainants were claiming damages against the Church for the abuse. ‘Some of these fellows now see the opportunity to obtain some easy cash,’ Finnigan wrote. When asked in the Royal Commission whether he ‘seriously’ thought ‘it’s an easy way to get money to go through the ordeal that people have to endure to win a trial for damages’, Finnigan gingerly replied, ‘No, not easy at all; drastically difficult’.
After his public evidence on Friday 11 December 2015, Finnigan found himself confronted outside court by a furious Levey.
‘I told him he was going straight to fucking hell for lying,’ Levey says. ‘And I said, “I will be fucking here in the morning waiting for you”.’ Levey says Finnigan, who looked shocked, did not say a word.
Finnigan called in sick the next day and that was the end of his evidence to the Royal Commission. Levey started a petition on Change.org to have the bishop removed. When the signatures got to 5200 on 30 December, Finnigan announced his retirement as Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane.
‘From those whom I may have disappointed, I seek forgiveness,’ Finnigan wrote to his flock.
Why do we need to know about Finnigan? Because of his proximity to Pell. The point about all this Finnigan business is that in the period that Ridsdale was at Mortlake, while Finnigan was on the consultors committee with Pell and was, indeed, Pell’s friend, Finnigan knew there were complaints about Ridsdale with Mortlake boys and an extremely inappropriate living arrangement between Ridsdale and young Levey.
Not just that. Finnigan was also aware that another consultor, Leo Fiscalini, knew more too. ‘I think there may have been something more serious than what I have mentioned, because … people from Mortlake approached the then Vicar-General, Monsignor Fiscalini,’ Finnigan told the CCI loss adjustor.
So this shows not just that Finnigan, Pell’s friend and fellow consultor, knew about problems at Mortlake when they were happening, but that Fiscalini had somehow made it known to Finnigan about the fact that he knew. Pell insists they uttered not a word to him.
Fiscalini had heard about the trouble with Ridsdale at Mortlake from a local farmer’s wife whose children went to St Colman’s. Her two youngest sons served as altar boy. ‘I remember he swept the whole area when he arrived with his outgoing personality and enveloping emotions,’ the farmer’s wife said.
So when one of her sons came home and begged her for a weekend sleepover at Father Gerry’s house, like the other boys at school were having, she allowed him and his brother to go. She knew that there was a problem as soon as she saw her pale and sullen son two days later. As she drove him home, he was slumped and silent in the back of the car. She went immediately to see Fiscalini.
We met Monsignor Fiscalini at the front door of the presbytery. I don’t think we went inside. I said to him, ‘We’ve got a problem in Mortlake.’ That was as far as we got. We didn’t even get a chance to say that it was Father Gerry who was involved. He told us that Bishop Mulkearns was not in the diocese at the time. He said, ‘I will deal with it’ and dismissed us. He did not ask us any questions.
The late Fiscalini, who was so greatly admired by Pell’s mother and had known the Cardinal since he was very young, clearly knew what he was dealing with. He knew it was Ridsdale and he knew it was kids. He knew that, because he’d heard it all before. He knew that, because he’d colluded with Mulkearns and moved Ridsdale from parish to parish. Not long after the farmer’s wife’s visit to Fiscalini, her sons came home with a letter apologising to the family, although Ridsdale made no admissions to abuse as such. ‘He wrote things like, “Poor me, I had a hard life. I had a hard upbringing,”’ said the farmer’s wife, who has since destroyed the letter.
When another mother disclosed to the farmer’s wife that Ridsdale had also abused her boys, the two families arranged to go to Ballarat to see Mulkearns—when they arrived they said they had ‘problems at Mortlake’.
‘Before we said anything more, Bishop Mulkearns replied “How am I to take the word of a child over one of my priests?”’ The mother said, ‘I think we were in his office for less than five minutes … After this, the four of us left the premises, went to the car and drove home in basic silence.’
Pell was not surprised by Mulkearns’ response. ‘If there was no contrary evidence or the evidence was pretty equivocal, people would be inclined to support the priest,’ he explained. ‘But for this to be said after so much evidence being presented on previous occasions is astounding.’
Another Mortlake mother known to the commission as ‘BAI’ says not long after Ridsdale arrived in Mortlake, her son came home, looking wan, and she asked him what was wrong. He blurted out: ‘I think our friend Father Gerry is gay,’ adding that Ridsdale had grabbed him and said he ‘wanted to feel his vibes’. She called the Bishop’s palace and spoke to Finnigan. BAI gave evidence to the Royal Commission that Finnigan told her ‘Bishop Mulkearns was not available but assured us there was no problem’. Finnigan now says he has no recollection of this, but agrees that if he did say it, it was ‘dishonest’. He was, he said, ‘just a small-time secretary’.
BAI went on to discover that Ridsdale had abused other children in the community eighteen months after she made that telephone call to Finnigan. She also spoke to the family doctor in the town about Ridsdale.
Furness pressed Pell on this: ‘We have now at this stage, in Mortlake, the family doctor being aware there was a problem with Ridsdale,’ Furness began, ‘a number of people knowing that there was a boy living in the presbytery with Ridsdale, and Father Finnigan being aware that one set of parents was concerned about the welfare of their child around Ridsdale … It’s getting close to common knowledge, isn’t it?’
His Eminence leaned forward to the microphone: ‘Certainly those people knew.’
‘At this stage, can I suggest, Cardinal,’ Furness put to Pell, ‘someone in the diocese within the Church should have accepted responsibility to do something about Ridsdale. Do you accept that?’
‘I would say that anyone, especially in a leadership position who knew what the situation was, had such an obligation.’
‘And that includes Father Finnigan, Father Fiscalini and also Father O’Toole, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes … They should have done what could be done to remove these dangers, prevent this awful situation.’
BAI also rang Sister Kate McGrath and told the nun, ‘I believe we’ve got a practising paedophile priest’. McGrath did act, but Mulkearns swore her to secrecy when Ridsdale was eventually moved. McGrath told the Royal Commission she was gutted by the episode:
I have always been angry that Bishop Mulkearns required me to keep quiet about Ridsdale’s activities. This was incredibly isolating for me personally, but far more importantly, it impeded my ability to assist the victims and the local community to deal with the impact of Ridsdale’s actions. I was unhappy that nothing was done for the children affected by Ridsdale’s abuse, when I thought the Church had a responsibility to support them and to help them deal with the terrible experiences they endured.
A delegation of parents also went to Mulkearns. ‘He just sat there and stared at us,’ BAI told the Royal Commission. Pell said this was ‘extraordinary and reprehensible’. ‘His repeated refusal to act is, I think, absolutely inexplicable,’ Pell said.
But the circle of people in Pell’s acquaintance in the Ballarat Diocese continued to widen. McGrath went to see Sister Patricia Vagg who knew Pell—her brother had gone to school with him. McGrath asked Vagg to ring Mulkearns. She did, and Mulkearns sent a delegate to deal with the situation. That delegate was one Monsignor Henry ‘Hank’ Nolan, Pell’s cousin. Nolan was concerned about the boy living at the presbytery—he’d seen Levey sleeping on a stretcher in Ridsdale’s bedroom and he said he demanded of Ridsdale that the boy be removed.
But according to Pell, ‘That—that is correct, but we couldn’t easily draw conclusions about how widely this was known … Because people were very reticent to talk about these things. But, obviously, with parents whose children had been abused, they would certainly have spoken about it.’
Furness took issue with this: ‘Cardinal, it cannot be fairly said that people were very reticent to talk about these things having regard to Sister McGrath’s statement.’
Pell demurred, saying he was ‘talking generally about society at that time’.
Furness reminded him that society at the time did not appear to have that same reticence—in Mortlake, Apollo Bay or Inglewood, doctors knew, people were talking about it at the pub; at Inglewood, the talk had got so bad that Ridsdale was more or less chased out of town.
‘These matters, of course, were scandalous, weren’t they?’ The Chair, Justice Peter McClellan, asked Pell.
‘Of course.’
McClellan reminded Pell of his earlier evidence that he had heard gossip about Monsignor Day in Mildura, another paedophile priest.
‘Are you now saying that notwithstanding this spreading knowledge through the parishes in relation to Ridsdale, and the scandalous nature of his behaviour, that there weren’t any rumours that came to your ears about him?’
‘I certainly am.’ Again, incredulous guffaws echoed around the room.
Pell later told Andrew Bolt in their interview after his evidence that his cousin Nolan was ‘notoriously monosyllabic’. He said the fact that none of these people including Nolan told him was not the major implausibility.
‘What is so overwhelmingly implausible is that we’ve got probably the worst paedophile in Australia active and we’ve got a bishop who didn’t just give him a second chance, but repeatedly refused to act … The Bishop and one or two of his helpers sat on this very tightly,’ Pell told Bolt. ‘And I think the reason for that is that if they had mentioned to the consultors why it was happening, it would have provoked an enormous discussion, and people would have said, “Well, what’s going on? Can we do this? Is this appropriate?”’
The Cardinal asserted that nobody who now knew him believed that he knew and did nothing. ‘I might occasionally be outspoken, I might occasionally put my foot in it, but anybody who knows me knows that I wasn’t going to be sitting there saying nothing if I was aware of that.’ Perhaps he might not have said nothing. He is right that it is certainly not in his style to say nothing. But that does not mean that he did not know.
Survivor Andrew Collins, watching on in Rome, did not buy Pell’s argument: ‘When you look at a group of people who grew up together, who were educated together, who were priests together, who were around the Diocese together, Ballarat is that central hub, the same people all meeting making these consultors’ decisions, it is just unbelievable to think that Pell didn’t know … of course [he] would have known.
‘Especially when you have a look and see that Pell was such an ambitious person. Ambitious people don’t bury their head in the sand and not look around them. They make sure they know. Because you know everybody’s strengths and weaknesses, because you want to move ahead of them.’
There was another consultors’ meeting in 1982. That’s when they decided to get Ridsdale out of Mortlake. So, bear in mind that by this meeting, Nolan knew, Fiscalini knew, as of course did Mulkearns. Three other priests from the diocese, along with Pell, made up the seven present. Mulkearns now had multiple complaints about Ridsdale, going back at least a decade to 1972. With that knowledge, the Bishop had moved his errant priest from Inglewood to Kangaroo Flat. From Kangaroo Flat to Bungaree. From Bungaree to Edenhope. From Edenhope to Melbourne, Melbourne to Mortlake. Underlined in the minutes of the 1982 meeting was the following:
The Bishop advised that it had become necessary for Fr Gerald Ridsdale to move from the Parish of Mortlake. Negotiations are under way to have him work with the Catholic Enquiry Centre in Sydney.
Pell told the Royal Commission he did not remember this, nor any of the consultors’ meetings. But he said that while the minutes were ‘consistent’ with Ridsdale being moved because of his sexual offending against children, the minutes were written to ‘distract from that possibility’. And this appointment to the National Pastoral Institute would have been seen as a promotion.
Furness questioned him about the meeting: ‘I suggest, Cardinal, that it is implausible, given the knowledge of three of those consultors and given the conduct of Ridsdale and the wording of those minutes, that the consultors, including you, did not know why it had become necessary for him to be moved?’
The survivors in Sydney and Rome sat up and craned their necks, waiting to see what he had to say.
‘That is a complete non sequitur. We can conclude about those who had that knowledge; we cannot conclude about the minds of those who were not privy to that knowledge.’
The survivors slumped back in their seats.
Furness wondered if he asked why it had become ‘necessary’ for Ridsdale to move.
‘I can’t remember explicitly asking,’ Pell said. ‘One of the priests present said that the reason given was homosexuality. I don’t have a recollection of that, but that would be entirely possible.’
Eyes in the courtroom narrowed.
Pell knew of the homosexuality explanation because he clearly had studied the evidence of one Father Eric Bryant, another consultor, as it seems he had with all other relevant witnesses. Not only that, his barrister had cross-examined Bryant. Bryant testified that he remembered that the reason it was necessary for Ridsdale to be moved was ‘a problem with homosexuality’. He did, however, admit there were other priests he knew at that time to be homosexual, but the Bishop never thought to move them.
Bryant had earlier noticed some very unhappy young boys staying with Ridsdale at his White Cliffs property in remote western New South Wales, and now says it had brought him to tears thinking of how he might have helped them had he known. Some time after the comments about the homosexuality in the consultors’ meeting, he says he started thinking of White Cliffs and wondering, ‘My God, what is the story there?’ But when asked by Counsel Assisting what he did about it, he conceded ‘probably very little, if nothing’.
Pell said he didn’t remember homosexuality being mentioned at that meeting. ‘I have—don’t have a clear recollection of the meeting at all, except to the effect that paedophilia was never mentioned.’
Furness wasn’t buying it. ‘Well if you can’t recall, how can you recall that he didn’t mention paedophilia?’
‘Because it was the sort of,’ Pell began, ‘the sort of category of event which was very clearly quite wrong and a reason for removing a priest at least for treatment.’
Pell agreed that by this time, he knew that there had been an ‘unusual’ number of priestly appointments for Ridsdale. Furness wondered if he asked the Bishop why. Pell replied that ‘would have been discussed … The Bishop would have given some reason.’ And so what, exactly, was that reason?
This is where some survivors started suspecting mental reservation. ‘I can recall very clearly that paedophilia was never mentioned and the recollection of another priest there is homosexuality was mentioned. I can’t recall that explicitly.’
He couldn’t recall a thing. He couldn’t remember a conversation. But, on the other hand, he could recall and remember that there was no discussion of paedophilia.
Furness suggested Pell and the other consultors should have asked far more questions and that by not doing so they failed in their responsibilities.
Pell adopted a tone, which again appeared to those gathered, quite frankly like mental reservation. ‘I have never suggested that I knew nothing. I’ve never suggested that I knew nothing about Ridsdale. I’ve never suggested that I didn’t inquire generally …
‘I knew nothing about his paedophilia. I knew that he was a somewhat difficult person and obviously that he had been shifted around quite a bit …’
The evidence of Pell’s old friend Finnigan about precisely what the consultors knew differs significantly from the Cardinal’s.
‘Bishop Mulkearns told the consultors why it was necessary to move Ridsdale, didn’t he?’ asked Furness of Finnigan.
‘Yes. He—yes.’
Like Pell, Finnigan went on to say that he had ‘no recollection that the Bishop spelt out why’. But he acknowledged that the consultors would have asked questions—they would have asked why.
Finnigan later conceded that he was ‘not in a position to deny’ Mulkearns told the consultors the reason for the move. And he agreed that if it was discussed, he most certainly would not have put it in the minutes—and that’s why it’s not there. He also agreed that it ‘follows’ that it was the bishop’s and consultors’ decision to send Ridsdale away from a parish, to somewhere he would have less access to children. With that admission, he went far further than Pell.
Finnigan even accepted some personal responsibility: ‘I’m happy to accept blame myself for a lot of the deficiencies in our approach.’
Another consultor, Frank Madden, who had written the glowing character reference for Ridsdale before Ridsdale’s first trial, was also contrite. ‘I can’t escape some responsibility for my role in not questioning some of the moves,’ Madden said. ‘I can understand that in retrospect. As being part of the college of consultors and as Vicar-General, I have to take some responsibility and I regret that … The responsibility for not having asked more questions or being more investigative of what was going on, going along with what was proposed. I can understand that now, and you wish—one might wish that I’d done something else.’
A third consultor, Father Eric Bryant, went even further, saying he too had to ‘accept responsibility on behalf of the diocese for what happened’ and ‘I have to own’ being part of what he later described as a ‘cover-up’. ‘I don’t think anybody knew how to handle the situation and I think the Diocese virtually took a great dive around that stage and sort of ended in the Dark Ages… I still feel a great guilt for what’s happened to people personally, because perhaps I didn’t know how to handle it, I didn’t ask the right questions, I didn’t do the right things as far as Ridsdale was concerned, and I was presuming that all the time, I suppose, that the Bishop and others were doing what was seen to be right … I think it was, you know, one of those dark, really dark passages of the last 20, 30 years of our history.’
The words of the other consultors in this regard draw into sharp relief the attitude of Pell towards his own role as a consultor. Very few people in the Royal Commission public gallery knew the detail of Bryant’s, Madden’s or Finnigan’s admissions as they watched Pell’s evidence. But nonetheless, the exasperation felt after his complete failure to take any responsibility on that first Tuesday in March hung over the room like a fog.
The Cardinal’s repeated insistence that he didn’t know about ‘paedophilia’ was interrupted with a question from the Chair. ‘We have heard from others that paedophilia has been understood by some in the Church as sexual activity with prepubescent children but not adolescent children,’ McClellan said.
Pell quickly replied that it ‘wasn’t a factor’ in his thinking, but conceded that he was aware of the distinction.
‘It is not unknown, of course, for priests to have engaged in sexual activity with adolescent boys, is it?’ McClellan asked.
‘That’s correct,’ the Cardinal replied.
‘And when, you say, the other consultor refers to the Bishop referring to homosexual activity, many in the Church would see homosexual activity as including sexual activity with adolescents who have not come of age, wouldn’t they?’
Pell: ‘I—I don’t think people would—that’s a theoretical possible classification. But in these sorts of discussions, I don’t think that decision—that distinction—would have been made.’
The Chair pressed on. ‘When you say you don’t think the distinction would have been made, there would be, would there not, in the Church to your knowledge, a somewhat different view taken of a homosexual relationship with a post-adolescent but nevertheless minor as opposed to abuse of a prepubescent child?’
Pell responded, ‘Yes, there is—I think the literature clearly distinguishes that.’
‘What literature?’ people in the courtroom mouthed in horror.
‘And there is a recognition in the Church amongst some writers and speakers of that distinction,’ Pell continued.
So the Church that lectured to people that sexual intercourse was not permitted outside the bounds of marriage, that had railed against the contraceptive pill and condoms, this same Church had made granular distinctions between how it viewed sexual relations, of whatever complexion, between adult priests and boys, depending on their age? Well, yes, it seems that it did.
In 2009, the Vatican’s representative in Geneva, Switzerland, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, was quoted as saying that the sexual abuse crisis in the United States and internationally was about homosexual priests preying on adolescent boys, rather than paedophilia per se. It was ‘more correct’, Tomasi said, to speak of ephebophilia, an attraction to adolescent males, than paedophilia.
According to LifeSiteNews, a Canadian pro-life news site which focuses on religious, particularly Catholic, issues, Tomasi’s views were ‘backed up by a report commissioned by the US bishops that found that in the overwhelming majority of cases the clergy involved were homosexuals, with 81 percent of victims being adolescent males’. The implication of this report appeared to be that the problem was homosexuality, not clergy abuse.
What point this is really supposed to make is questionable. One possibility is that they believe that if you weed the homosexuals out of the clergy, then you’ll be able to fix the problem. The first issue with this is that it blames the clergy abuse problem on homosexuals, rather than the Church taking any responsibility. The second issue, of course, is that it ignores the point that by law and by all social norms, 11- to 17-year-olds are still children. It ignores the overwhelming evidence to the Royal Commission from survivors that 11- to 17-year-olds are just as profoundly affected when they are raped by an adult who is supposed to represent all that is good and holy in the world as are their younger brothers and sisters.
Back at the Royal Commission in Australia, Bryant had, in his evidence, noted that a preoccupation with sex with postpubescent boys was considered, in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘curable’, whereas sex with prepubescent children was considered paedophilia and therefore incurable.
Pell repeatedly referred to that word ‘paedophilia’ as something that he said was never discussed in the consultors’ meetings. Whether the use of this term (excluding ephebophilia) was a case of mentalis restrictio is something only the Cardinal and his God can really know.
To be fair to Pell, the meetings took place thirty-four years before the Royal Commission hearing. Remembering the details would be extremely difficult. And it’s also reasonable to think that despite the hazy recollection, if offending against children was discussed, it was such a jarring topic that it is bound to have stuck out. In those ways, his reasoning makes sense in theory.
But what makes this theory questionable is that he also claims that none of the others with knowledge, whom he knew very well, discussed it with him—George Pell, the one marked out, more than anyone else present, for greatness. Someone who was looked up to in the community. The sort of person with whom you might like to curry favour by providing him with information. Again, just a theory. But the theory is bolstered by the fact that others who were not present but were nonetheless well known to Pell also knew about Ridsdale’s activities. That is what stretched incredulity like a rubber band so tightly that day in court. So tightly that inevitably, it snapped back in the witness’s face and stung like a wasp.
Furness calmly proceeded. ‘You do not have any recollection of what was said at the [1982 consultors’] meeting, although you have a recollection of what was not said; is that right?’
‘The clear expectation was if there was criminal activity, that would be mentioned,’ Pell said.
Furness asked the obvious question: ‘You said in your answer that the clear expectation was if there was criminal activity, that would be mentioned. Now, what was the basis of that clear expectation? Where did you get that clear expectation from, Cardinal?’ He replied that it came from his experience, his ‘general way of thinking’.
The Chair of the Commission wondered whether, in minutes of this nature, given the ‘sensitivity of the subject matter’, ‘gentle and euphemistic language’ might have been used. Pell agreed it was—and that was what kept him in the dark.
Pell continued with an odd monologue in defence of the Church’s conduct, describing it in a way that was the exact opposite of how witness after witness had portrayed its operation over many decades, across many dioceses. ‘We do not propose to shift priests, promote them, when it’s been shown they have engaged in criminal activity. That’s not the basis on which the Church has ever acted,’ the Cardinal declared. The incredulity wasp snapped back and stung Pell on the face, with McClellan calling it out: ‘Well, it’s clearly the basis on which Mulkearns acted for Ridsdale, isn’t it?’
Pell conceded, ‘It is, and that is totally inexplicable.’
Not so inexplicable when put in the context of what was happening not just around Australia, but also across the world, for decades. Documents like the Murphy Report in Ireland show it was the default plan.
Pell insisted that even the consultors who had known about the abuse had less of a moral responsibility for the shifting of Ridsdale than the Bishop because they had no authority, and were merely in an advisory role.
The Chair seemed to see where he was going with this. ‘Cardinal, you keep referring back to authority and structural responsibility, but it is the case, isn’t it, that within the Church you would expect and indeed might I suggest the community would expect—that each priest would act responsibly, regardless of their position?’
He was met again with some vintage obfuscation, capped off with a familiar Pell trope: you people just don’t understand my Church. ‘To understand the Catholic Church’s structure and who has authority, you go to Church law, and according to the canon law of the Church, you can there identify the different levels of responsibility—it might be a jurisdictional responsibility; it might be a moral responsibility at different levels. But it’s from the canon law that you decide what the situation is within the Church.’
And here the Chair got to the nub of Pell’s true thinking on this, the bubble he finds himself in, where the ordinary rules of morality, decency and even criminal responsibility are leavened to varying degrees by byzantine Church structures.
This is a perspective which brings Dr Wayne Chamley of advocacy group Broken Rites to a rather stark conclusion: without knowledge of the lengths the Church went to to cover up these crimes, it might otherwise seem a gross exaggeration, even a conspiracy theory.
‘I see the Catholic Church as an example of the state of anarchy,’ Chamley told me. ‘Not marching-in-the-streets anarchy, but in terms of members abiding by their own laws—the canon laws—and those responsible for running the show deciding not to abide by society’s laws. That’s the classic definition of anarchy.
‘Nobody accepts responsibility for anything. And so it is allowed to go on.
‘They chose to surround themselves with their canon law edicts and not do anything else and believe in that because they were held in such high esteem, by very faithful people who saw that priests could do no wrong.
‘And they just let hundreds of people have their lives so impacted that it ruined them. And some of them decided to take their lives.’
Despite the initial euphoria of Rome—the recognition that the survivors received from the international media attention—Paul Levey tried to kill himself several months after returning from Rome. Fortunately, he survived the attempt and he’s trying to keep positive. But like Chamley, the Church’s rigid adherence to canon law baffles him.
‘Everyone else has to abide by the law of the land; why does canon law put them above the law of the land?’