THE BIRD
Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission, Gail Furness, SC: There is a reference in that paragraph to Father Searson stabbing to death a bird in front of the children Cardinal George Pell: I don’t know whether the bird was already dead …
Royal Commission, March 2016
There were many, many attempts to get someone to listen to the fact that Father Peter Searson was dangerous, decades before Julie Stewart and Graeme Sleeman ever came to the Royal Commission. Infamously now, one of those attempts was by a delegation in November 1989 of Doveton parent and teacher representatives who went to see the Auxiliary Bishop responsible for the region, George Pell. A list of grievances which had been prepared included ‘harassment of children’, and a range of unsettling issues like hanging around the kids’ toilets, showing children a dead body in a coffin, forcing children to attend confession on demand, harassing staff and parents, and cruelty to animals. The priest was known to wear army fatigues on school grounds and teachers from time to time found bullet shells on the playground. Pell was also given a briefing from a representative of the Catholic Education Office (CEO), Norm Lalor. Lalor is now in a nursing home and was unable to give evidence to the Royal Commission.
But Pell made the argument that while he was told about this in general terms, the real truth was shielded from him. That is, the real truth that Searson was a sex offender. According to the Cardinal, he was deceived by Lalor, the CEO, the delegation from Doveton and the then archbishop, Frank Little.
‘I was a new boy on the block. I was known to be capable of being outspoken. They might have been fearful of just what line I—I would take when confronted with all the information,’ Pell told the Royal Commission during his evidence on day three. Further, the CEO was, according to the Cardinal, ‘fearful’ and ‘very keen to keep the lid on the situation’. Even further, he added that the CEO was trying to protect Archbishop Little, ‘because they might have come to the conclusion that he had chosen a certain path and felt it was their duty to support him in that’.
According to the Pell thesis, there was a history of people deceiving him because they did not know how he might deal with the information. The consultors of the Ballarat Diocese, Monsignor Fiscalini, Bishop Mulkearns, his friend Brian Finnigan and even his first cousin Henry Nolan, by this interpretation, had also deceived him too.
‘It’s an extraordinary position, Cardinal,’ Counsel Assisting Gail Furness, SC, said to Pell during his Rome evidence.
‘Counsel, this was an extraordinary world, a world of crimes and cover-ups, and people did not want the status quo to be disturbed,’ he replied.
‘And you put yourself in this world as being the person who would disturb the status quo, do you?’ Furness continued, archly.
‘I not only disturbed the status quo, but when I became archbishop, I turned the situation right around so that the Melbourne Response procedures were light years ahead of all this obfuscation and prevarication and deception.’
At the time when all of this obfuscation and conspiring to deceive the intrepid truth-seeker, Pell, was allegedly happening—both in Ballarat and in Melbourne—there was no evidence at all to suggest that he was a fearless advocate of children, against child abuse, someone who rocked the boat. In fact, all of the evidence would suggest quite the opposite. He did nothing with the rumours he knew about Monsignor John Day abusing children in Mildura. And when a ‘brave and honest lad’ told him about abuse at the hands of Dowlan at St Patrick’s, again he did not act. ‘He wasn’t asking me to do anything,’ the Cardinal famously said.
There was also evidence that the Searson incident with Julie Stewart went further than just Pell. A memorandum on the letterhead of the Vicar-General, Hilton Deakin, talked about ‘sexual interference’ of a girl in the confessional by Searson. ‘This could go to court’, it said.
Parents set up a sustained letter-writing campaign—to Deakin and to Little. Strangely, Searson remained in the job for years after those letters were written, stamped and sent to the archdiocese. Deakin says Little told them they were not to be discussed. The one I find most difficult to read is written by the hand of a 10-year-old, complete with spelling mistakes. It recounts what happened to Julie Stewart and also says Searson ‘pulled a gun out of his pants’ when asking little boys to go and turn off the sprinklers.
None of the teachers will let us go and see him alone there has to be three or four of us. Some children from our class went to see our princaple but it did nothing. He threanteneds us you can’t walk past him with out being scared. Our princaple is leaving because of Father you see, Mr Sleeman our princaple can’t get on with Father so he has to leave. If I was to say who should leave I would say Father as he sexuly assaulted my friend and it’s not going to happen again.
Furness brought the Cardinal’s attention to one particular 1991 letter from an irate parent who had written to Deakin to complain. At this point, one of the most truly surreal moments of the Pell evidence took place.
‘There is a reference in that paragraph to Father Searson stabbing to death a bird in front of the children?’ Furness asked the Cardinal.
‘Y–es,’ the Cardinal replied, appearing distracted.
‘Did that come to your attention?’
‘At some stage, I think. I don’t know whether the bird was already dead, but at some stage I certainly was informed of this bizarre happening,’ Pell replied.
Guffaws echoed around the courtroom. The tone had moved to high farce. On the one hand, it was something of a comic relief. People started tweeting madly. Stewart put her head in her hand and shook it. The collective feeling was that, however amusing, the bird was a tell. That a person could make such an absurd answer to such a question said something about the person answering. Ballarat survivor Andrew Collins, watching in the room in Rome, said the first word that came into his mind was ‘empathy’. ‘To me it showed that he struggled to show any,’ Collins says. ‘We didn’t see it as a blunder, as he thinks carefully before he speaks and is very intelligent and articulate. This is just how his mind works. If it’s not about him, involving him or of benefit to him, then it hardly registers.’
Furness did not miss it either. ‘Does it matter whether the bird was dead, or it was stabbed when it was dead?’ she asked the Cardinal.
‘Not—not really,’ said Pell, sounding bored and distracted. ‘Not really.’
On 1 October 1992, there was a meeting of the Curia, of which Pell was a member, along with the other bishops and senior clergy of the archdiocese. The minutes of that meeting are an insight into how these matters were covered up in those days—the euphemistic way of referring to scandalous content in order to keep it off the written record. While the minutes go into a reasonable amount of detail about matters such as, for instance, sale of land, Catholic homes for the elderly and restoration of the cathedral, discussion of the ever-hastening crisis at Doveton is deliberately vague. The item is headed ‘A CERTAIN PP’. PP stands for parish priest. ‘The Archbishop referred to some material which had been provided to Bishop O’Connell by the Catholic Education Office.’
That’s all it says. No more, no less. The material was the chilling typed accounts of children, bashed out on an old typewriter, talking about their dealings with Searson. It’s shocking to read in a contemporary context, knowing how little was done.
‘I think he is gay… I think that something is rong about him. I think father needs medical help … He makes me feel scared. He makes me uncof terbel. HE IS MAD.’
‘Father has been hitting people in the gut, head, neck, stomach. He hits you as hard as he can. He says if you don’t want to serve (as an altar boy) … you are bad … You are being bad to god.’
‘Father gives me the no feeling when he touches me. Once I went serving and father hit me in the neck. And once father felt me. I think father is gay. I recon his will start to feel us all over.’
‘… He hits us he digs his hands in your side he grabs you around the neck. Soon he will be feeling us all over … I want to go talk to him and say FATHER YOU DO ANYTHING TO ME AGAIN AND YOU’LL BE SORRY … I think that we should replace him. I HATE FATHER PETER.’
‘When I was serving father Peter used to hit the severs on the back, on the side of the ribs, in the cheast, on your head.’
‘We are all very scared because we don’t know where he is going to touch us next. Father could sexually abuse us. He is dangerous …’
Even with these accounts floating around the Catholic education system and parked with the most senior people in the archdiocese, Searson did not leave Doveton for another five years. But Pell’s ignorance of them can be explained, according to Pell: yet again, he was having the wool pulled over his eyes. When asked by Furness about this meeting of the Curia, Pell did not disagree that the minute was referring to the children’s statements.
It is important to point out that while the then Bishop Pell was a member of the Curia, he was overseas at the time of this meeting. But of course, it wasn’t just Archbishop Frank Little that knew of these matters. So too did Monsignors Deakin and O’Connell. So neither of them, Furness probed, thought to tell Pell about those accounts in any forum?
‘Not in a way that led me to think that they thought further action should be taken against Searson or that he should be removed,’ the Cardinal replied.
Counsel Assisting reminded Pell of another incident, in March 1993, where Searson held a knife to the chest of a young girl in the Holy Family church, saying to her ‘if you move, this will go through you’. That incident, still a good four years before Searson was removed, was referred to the then Vicar-General, Monsignor Gerry Cudmore. That incident was referred to police and discussed by the Curia, whose minutes said:
The matter has been discussed several times with the Vicar General and by Curia. The decision was taken that in the absence of action by the Police and the unwillingness of the parents to pursue the matter, nothing could be done about this incident.
The Cardinal could not, this time, say he was not informed, because there it was in writing. ‘It is outrageous, I suggest to you, Cardinal, that the Curia could be given information of this sort and do nothing?’ Furness put to him.
‘The police had been informed, they’d investigated, and they couldn’t proceed … The recommendation was that nothing could be done,’ Pell replied.
Furness pressed on, ‘But it’s irrelevant, isn’t it, Cardinal, to the obligation of the Church to take action to prevent its parishioners and children from being harmed, whether or not the police act?’
‘That—that is correct. Obviously, of course, if the police are unable to proceed for lack of evidence, that is a significant factor in colouring what the Church authorities might decide to do,’ Pell responded.
Here, the Chair, Justice Peter McClellan, pointed out that though the parents were unwilling to go to the police, that didn’t relieve the Church of the responsibility to act on the priest.
Pell replied that while it did not ‘relieve the Church of such an obligation’, it was ‘a factor in how you can go forward effectively’.
‘And given what you knew then about Searson, is it not the position that the Curia should have said, “This man has to go”?’ McClellan asked Pell, who replied that it was ‘a possible conclusion, for sure’.
‘And in not giving that advice, the Curia would not have been doing its job properly, would it?’
‘I—I think you would have to say that,’ Pell conceded. Pell’s lawyers made the point in their final submissions that the police knew far more about Searson than he did. Again, like Operation Plangere, the reasons behind what went on there are a mystery. There is another book in Victoria Police’s handling of these matters at the time.
Furness drew the Cardinal’s attention to the statement by current Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, that there was a ‘complete failure of process’ in the archdiocese when it came to Searson. She asked Pell if he agreed that he had participated in that.
‘Tangentially, marginally … because as an Auxiliary you’re not part of the official procedures. I regret that even at this stage I wasn’t a bit more vigorous in my questioning or commenting.’
During the years that Graeme Sleeman and the teachers and parishioners of Doveton were trying, in vain, to get rid of a dangerous paedophile in their midst, the parishioners of my own parish in a mortgage-belt area of outer Melbourne had a situation with a ‘PP’ too. His name was Father John van Suylen. He was a gentle and decent priest, but not particularly financially savvy. My father was on the parish finance committee and they had overseen the building of a school and now a church. The priest was insisting on employing four paid pastoral workers at a time when budgets were extremely tight because of the building program. Van Suylen’s position was ‘God will provide’, but the finance committee knew it would put considerable pressure on the young families already supporting the parish. Van Suylen was implacable. The situation became untenable and, with heavy hearts, my father and the other members of the committee wrote to Archbishop Little to inform him of the problems they were having with the priest. Little supported the finance committee and van Suylen was fairly quickly removed. He was gutted, felt unfairly maligned, and it caused great division as many good parishioners simply wanted to support their priest.
The point is, the Archbishop supported the finance committee’s concerns. The process was over relatively quickly and the matter was excised. Over a financial dispute. The message of the time? Don’t mess around with the money if you are a priest. Harm children, on the other hand, and you get to stay in the job for twelve years.
The head of the CEO during the period that Searson was harming children was Monsignor Tom Doyle, who had, coincidentally, the same name as the American canon lawyer who is an expert on mental reservation. I went to see Doyle at his home in inner Melbourne after Pell’s evidence from Rome. Doyle answered the door, but told me he was on the way to the doctor’s. I told him I could meet him when he got back. But he said with a nervy half-laugh that that wouldn’t be necessary. I said to him it appeared that Pell had thrown him under the bus during his evidence by saying his office and others had conspired to deceive him about what Searson had done. Didn’t he want to correct the record? He fixed his gaze at me and smiled, two parts world-weary, one part wry, and told me he didn’t want to comment. I repeated that this was his opportunity to correct the public record. This was a matter of some importance. He told me he needed to go to the doctor’s. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, dear, but I really must go.’
My initial impression from this brief exchange was that Doyle had given up on worrying about such things. But the Royal Commission recalled Doyle some weeks later and his evidence suggested there were some burning embers in the old belly yet. He took his opportunity to set the record straight. Like a number of his fellow officials from the CEO, he took that opportunity to toss the Cardinal back under the same bus that the Cardinal had shoved him under. Of Lalor, now in the nursing home, he said, ‘I do not believe he would have deceived Bishop Pell in respect of any matter’. He did not agree that the CEO deceived the Cardinal.
I do not understand the basis for Cardinal Pell’s evidence that representatives of the CEO were reluctant to be frank with him because they were keen to ‘keep the lid on the situation’, and were fearful of any decisive action he might take. I was not aware of any person at the CEO having a reluctance to be frank with Bishop Pell.
In 1989, CEO personnel (including me) had for a number of years been trying to get Archbishop Little to take decisive action in respect of Father Searson and he would not do so. It does not make sense to me that the CEO would be reluctant to be frank with Bishop Pell because he would take the decisive action we had been trying to get Archbishop Little to take.
Contrary to the Pell thesis that Doyle was trying to ‘protect’ Little and lying to Pell, Doyle said quite the opposite. ‘We would have welcomed “decisive action” and in Cardinal Pell’s terms we wanted to “take the lid off” the situation and have it addressed.’
Another CEO official, Alan Dooley, gave similar evidence: he was never instructed to withhold evidence from Pell, was not aware of anyone else doing so nor of ‘anyone being under any instruction to “keep a lid” on the situation at Doveton’.
A third official, Peter Annett, said the same:
I do not believe any member of the CEO staff would have deliberately withheld information from Bishop Pell in a briefing.
I also do not believe CEO staff would have had any reason to want to deceive Bishop Pell. I find it difficult to believe that staff were not frank because they were fearful that Bishop Pell might take decisive action against Searson, when CEO staff had long wanted decisive action to be taken.
Annett said his immediate reaction to reading the transcript of Pell’s evidence was ‘some shock’. ‘I was disappointed, and perhaps angry, but certainly very disappointed,’ he said.
One of the teachers who was involved in the Doveton delegation to Auxiliary Bishop Pell, Simon Stack, remembered that they were received by a ‘professional and polite’ Pell. But the tone changed when Stack brought up the fact that Searson was not ‘a well man and he is in your care’.
‘Bishop Pell frowned and said words to the effect of “you don’t need to tell me how to do my job. I know what my responsibilities are,”’ Stack told the Royal Commission. At the end of the meeting, he recalled Pell saying, ‘I will look into the matter and I will deal with it’.
Another teacher, Dorothea Stack, said she remembered talking about the ‘coffin incident’, a matter of cruelty against a cat, and ‘Father Searson entering the boys’ toilets’. ‘It is possible that I mentioned my concern was a sexual one in relation to the toilet incident, but my personal concerns were primarily about Father Searson’s mental stability and the safety of the children,’ Dorothea Stack said.
There is certainly a sense that there was a bit of beating around the bush that went on in that delegation, as was the way of the time. Having read many letters written to bishops from parishioners in the seventies and eighties, I have noticed that there is a frequent simpering, somewhat cowed, tone. These are letters that are written to warn a bishop that a priest is or might be a predator. Even when people have very grave concerns and are trying to make it clear that children are in danger, it’s clear that discussing these matters was not easy and that they defer to the bishop. They speak euphemistically of, for instance, ‘the difficult situation’, ‘the nasty business’, ‘the trouble’. A union representative who was present at the Doveton delegation meeting, Gerard Palmer, gave evidence that he was disappointed the teachers did not push their concerns effectively enough.
Pell’s lawyers’ final submissions to the Royal Commission about the Searson matter pick up on this beating about the bush and run with it. ‘This was not a meeting called to discuss the sexual abuse of children by Searson. This was a meeting called by teachers because they were exasperated about having to deal with a difficult man in a workplace setting,’ the submissions point out.
The Pell submission makes much of the fact that, of the sixteen items on the list of grievances, the first items on the list raise ‘such mundane issues as: lights removed from sockets in classrooms, windows secured closed, gas heaters not working/serviced … Children were the last category mentioned.’ You want to grab those teachers by the retrospective metaphoric shoulders and give them a vigorous shake. According to the Pell camp, the thing reads like a workplace health and safety document. However, name the person in any workplace in Australia, no matter how timid the complainants are against him, who ‘harasses children’, unnecessarily frequents children’s toilets, shows kids a dead body for kicks, is deliberately cruel to animals in front of primary school students. Pell’s legal team might argue that there was ‘an ambiguity’ to the sexual misconduct alleged, that it wasn’t serious sexual abuse alleged. But this was a dangerous man. And most notably, dangerous to children.
It’s a matter taken up by Pell’s own good friend and successor, Archbishop Denis Hart, who clearly didn’t toe the party line the day he gave evidence and declared, undoubtedly much to the aghast chagrin of the Cardinal in Rome, that the written list of grievances were sufficient to remove Searson from the parish. When asked what he would have done in Pell’s position that day, being presented with this list of grievances, Hart said he would have ‘gone to the Archbishop also and asked to say that “you’ve got to get him out of the place straight away”.’ If he was frustrated at the Archbishop’s response, he agreed that he would have ‘certainly, certainly’ taken it to the Curia. And goodness, yes, he would have insisted that the matter be minuted—‘yes. These are serious matters.’
Did Pell do all of this? No. He did not. And that, among other reasons, is what led Counsel Assisting Furness to conclude in her final submissions to the Royal Commission in November 2016 that both Pell and other archdiocesan officials ‘failed to exercise proper care for the children of Doveton’. Notably, in his lawyers’ final submissions, the Cardinal said that Hart had the benefit of hindsight and, because he was not involved in the delegation, it was ‘necessarily speculative’. It says that the focus on the delegation to Pell was ‘extraordinary and unwarranted’, the connection with Searson and Doveton ‘no more than peripheral’, Pell’s involvement in the Searson affair ‘relatively minor’.
But the information of the CEO has to be coupled with those dreadful letters from the children that were available to the Curia when it was discussing the ‘PP’, not to mention the young girl making an allegation about Searson holding a knife to her chest.
In her final submissions to the Commission, Furness gave short shrift to Pell’s claim that he was the victim of a vast and deceptive conspiracy by the CEO, the Archbishop and at least two members of the Curia of the Archdiocese: Deakin and O’Connell. She submitted that the evidence of members of the CEO that they had ‘no interest in deceiving Cardinal Pell or in trying to protect Searson … should be accepted’. Here, Furness is a model of understatement. The ‘deception’ theory completely flies in the face of the fact that those same officers were sending those harrowing accounts of children who were terrified of Searson to anyone in the archdiocese who might listen. It presents a slightly bizarre argument to suggest that they were so Machiavellian as to send those accounts to people they knew would not act, instead of to the brave and fearless truth-teller, George Pell. And even if that theory held any water whatsoever, is there even a scintilla, to use the Pell defence’s own language, of evidence that he did anything to halt the cover-up of clergy child abuse before that time? To call out the priests whom he believed to be offenders? From where did he get this intimidating reputation as truth-teller? The point is, he didn’t have one at all.
Interestingly, in Pell’s legal team’s final submissions, they backed right away from the assertion of deliberate deception or elaborate cover-up: ‘Ultimately, it is most probable that Bishop Pell was not told about historical allegations of sexual misconduct by the CEO because it was the view of its officers that Bishop Pell was not part of the decision-making process, and there was no point in providing that information to him.’
Furness concluded in her final submissions, ‘The matters known to Cardinal Pell on his own evidence … were sufficient that he ought reasonably have concluded that more serious action needed to be taken in relation to Searson.’
One option was for Searson to be removed or suspended as parish priest. At the very least a thorough investigation needed to be undertaken as to the veracity of the complaints, in particular the allegation of sexual misconduct …
It was within his power to investigate the matters further and it was also within his power to urge the Archbishop to take action against Searson … Cardinal Pell should also have taken direct action of his own to investigate the veracity of the complaints, in particular the allegation of sexual misconduct.
His failure to take any such action meant that Cardinal Pell, like other senior officials in the Archdiocese before and after him, missed an important opportunity to recognise and deal with the serious risks posed by Searson. Cardinal Pell and other senior Archdiocesan officials failed to exercise proper care for the children of Doveton.
As the complaints about Searson kept piling up during the 1990s, he was eventually placed on ‘administrative leave’ by the archdiocese in 1997. Searson was seventy-four. He was finally convicted of physical assault, rather than sexual, in December that year. He pleaded guilty to assaulting a 12-year-old altar boy. The Dandenong Magistrates Court was told he whacked two altar boys over the ears at Doveton because they were giggling in mass. When one of the boys’ mothers complained to the school and to police, Searson initially denied the allegation, saying he merely ‘touched’ the boy on the head. But the boy and his mother stuck to their guns and eventually Searson caved. He was placed on a 6-month good behaviour bond. Searson retired as a Catholic priest the following year.
As Julie Stewart watched the Pell evidence that day in Sydney, her plucky demeanour vanished. After the hearing, we bundled her and Graeme Sleeman into a taxi back to the ABC. Julie marched into the building and would not listen to a victim’s advocate who was warning her about the risks of going on television. She was furious. ‘I’m talking, I’m talking, I’m doing it, get me away from that woman,’ she kept saying, gripping on to my arm.
She sat down in a chair across from me in the darkened studio. I asked her what she made of the Cardinal’s defensive attitude.
‘I wasn’t at all surprised because I guess I’ve come to the understanding and the …,’ she trailed off, as if slapped in the face by that understanding. And that’s when she kind of fell apart. Her lip began to tremble. Her brow furrowed and she became, once again, the little kid that was so hurt, so let down, so ignored. She looked down, choking back little sobs.
‘Sorry,’ she croaked out. ‘… Acknowledgment for all of us victims I speak on behalf of, that he will never acknowledge any knowledge.’
‘[Pell] played a significant role in my past, along with Searson and many others who have failed in the Church’s name. But for my future he is nothing. He is insignificant.’
Julie wrote to me some months after the Pell evidence. She said she’d had a big emotional crash after Sydney. She had reached her lowest ebb. But she felt she had bounced back. ‘As usual, I picked myself up and got on with it, as I do.’
When I hear the term ‘survivor’, Julie Stewart is always the first person I think of. Julie Stewart is pretty much the definition of a survivor.
Graeme Sleeman was forced to leave Doveton, his career in tatters, when the Church supported Searson instead of him. Pupils and parents at Holy Family were gutted and commenced a letter-writing campaign to try to save him. It didn’t work. He was unemployable as a teacher in the Catholic system. Pell now says he feels terribly for him. But Sleeman tells me that when, in the 1990s, after applying for fifteen jobs in schools after leaving Doveton, he asked Pell to publicly support him, he was rebuffed.
‘He hung up. No more communication,’ Sleeman says. Oddly, Sleeman was given money for many years, totalling about $90 000, by the Melbourne Response’s Independent Commissioner Peter O’Callaghan, because, O’Callaghan told Sleeman, he felt sorry for him. This money came out of O’Callaghan’s own pocket. He then received $150 000 in an ex gratia payment from the archdiocese—although O’Callaghan told him the archdiocese had done nothing wrong. It’s a curious final detail in the saga, even more so when it’s considered that Julie Stewart wasn’t afforded the same pity—she got $25 000, on the books. Sleeman now manages a cattle property on the Gold Coast. He is still trying to find a way to sue the Catholic Church for the losses he suffered.
Peter Searson died in June 2009. He was eighty-six. Like Nazareno Fasciale before him, he was given a full requiem mass at Sacred Heart Church in Carlton. According to Hart, a decree of removal as parish priest had been issued, but there had not yet been a reply from Rome. That being the case, Searson remained ‘in orders’ and ‘therefore he was still entitled to be buried a priest’. Photographs show a stream of priests filing into the church. His mass booklet shows a stern Searson. He is not smiling.
The procession walked in to the stirring hymn ‘Be Not Afraid’, which is, of course, Pell’s motto:
If you pass through raging waters
In the sea, you shall not drown,
If you walk amid the burning flames
You shall not be harmed.
There was no mention in the booklet of Searson’s ‘past’. But the readings were thoughtfully chosen. And sort of chilling. The second reading came from the Romans: ‘Could anyone accuse those that God has chosen? When God acquits, could anyone condemn? Could Christ Jesus? No!’
The mourners piled out of Sacred Heart and trundled down the road to the cemetery where Searson was laid to rest.
‘God is good,’ Julie Stewart once told me. ‘It’s man that fails.’