THE LAST DAYS OF ROME
The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore, let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light.
Paul’s Letter to the Romans
For an almost 75-year-old man, George Pell’s forensic nineteen-and-a-half hours of evidence to the Royal Commission, slogged out over four nights into the small hours of four Roman mornings, was no small feat. Particularly for a man whose Vatican doctor said was in such perilous health.
He was exhausted by it, and referred to his herculean effort in his interview with Sky’s Andrew Bolt. After two days of the Cardinal’s evidence, Bolt wrote a column in the News Limited tabloids criticising Pell for his ‘sad story that wasn’t of much interest’ gaffe. Pell had, in Bolt’s view, ‘uttered words that will stain his reputation forever’ and the Commission was ‘rightly aggressive’. But Bolt then performed a spectacular backflip, and took back the criticism. ‘I joined [the] attack on George Pell,’ Bolt said. ‘And I think for the first time in my life I’m trending positive on Twitter as a result. I think I owe an apology and I’ll go back to being hated on Twitter.’ Instead of implying that Pell had been, in effect, wilfully blind, Bolt now took the view that Pell was simply ‘not plugged into the community’ and was ‘incurious’. The pair mended fences, and they sat down for a 1-hour interview in which Pell repeatedly appealed for a ‘fair go’ for him and the Catholic Church. It was, however, a nuanced and at times fascinating interview and Bolt did not flinch from asking some tough questions of Pell. For reasons known only to Bolt, the nuance of his interview with Pell has not been repeated in his columns since then. From that day onwards, Bolt has remained steadfast in his defence of the Cardinal and his assumption that any allegations about Pell are simply part of an attack by progressives and secularists.
Before he met with Bolt, Pell had also had a much-anticipated meeting with the survivors who had come to Rome to bear witness to his evidence. Although not all of them were interested in going. Paul Levey couldn’t bring himself to listen to another utterance from the Cardinal’s mouth. Chrissie and Anthony Foster also did not go. Anthony had been planning to meet with Pell, but only if the Cardinal would speak about the Melbourne Response—which the Fosters have always been passionately committed to reforming. The last time they had met with the Cardinal, in 2014 in Australia, Anthony says he had told Pell, ‘I know you are not part of the Catholic Church in Australia, but you have the power and influence to make this happen’, to which, Foster says, Pell replied, ‘I’ll talk to Denis [Hart]’. But this time, Anthony met Pell after he came out of the lift at the Quirinale following the Cardinal’s evidence. He decided to approach him and remind the Cardinal of their earlier conversations about changing the Melbourne Response. Anthony says to his surprise, the Cardinal replied that he would be ‘unable to advance’ the matter. Anthony was absolutely gutted. ‘I then opened my heart to him and let him see the extreme sadness inside me by saying the words, “I am a broken man”,’ Anthony later wrote to Pell’s private secretary. ‘Words that truly express the suffering of a father who has lost a child to the scourge of clergy sexual abuse and another who is severely disabled for the same reason. ‘I allowed him to see my suffering in a way that I have allowed no other person.’
Anthony says that Pell then placed his hand on top of his own and ‘left it there for some time’. As they parted, Anthony says he told Pell, ‘you have the influence to make things change’. But as Pell walked away, he says the Cardinal replied, ‘If only it would be’, and walked out to his waiting car, surrounded by a media pack. Anthony was reeling. He went straight out to the reporters who had finished trying to get a news grab from Pell and he told them about the conversation. He was highly emotional. After that, Anthony received an email from Pell’s private secretary, Father Mark Withoos. The tone of that email was essentially that Anthony had blown it because his comments to the media ‘significantly misrepresent the way the conversation went’. ‘I am sorry to say that, despite the clear words of concern, sadness and support from the Cardinal, it seems the meeting was instead used by you as a platform for further unfounded criticism of Cardinal Pell,’ Withoos wrote. There would be no meeting. When Anthony wrote back trying to make Withoos understand what he had actually said, Withoos did not reply, later blaming his tardiness on a ‘bad cold’.
The survivors and supporters who did go went single file into a small chamber of the Hotel Quirinale to wait their turn. They were offered coffee and hard candies. ‘Pell got himself a glass of water and I got one for everyone else,’ says Peter Blenkiron.
Mark Harrison had originally not intended to go to the meeting, but after speaking to his family, he decided it was best to go—for their sake and his. Harrison was one of the twins whose sister Donna Cushing had spoken to me—the family of little kids brought away for a week of horrible abuse by Ridsdale to Edenhope.
Chairs were arranged in a circle. Harrison watched as all of the others shook Pell’s hand. ‘I took a step back, I did not shake his hand,’ Harrison remembers. ‘How could you shake a hand like that, to be honest?’
‘I told him I was really disgusted and let down by himself and the Catholic Church. And how it had affected my family and my life,’ Harrison says. ‘And how my brother had committed suicide. I said they needed to do much more to restore my faith. Then I read Donna’s letter.
‘I was emotional and crying a little bit. I had to say what I felt. Pell was looking down at the floor most of the time, looking very sombre and like he was feeling sorry for himself. He said something like, “Thank you for sharing that”.’ Harrison says another priest who was there came up to him afterwards and said, ‘Well done, Pell needed to hear that. There are a lot of people that don’t like him in the Church and he needs to hear that and hopefully he can change.’ And then he said, ‘pat your sister on the back for writing that, I’m really proud of her for that’.
Vanessa Beetham, who was there as a support person for the survivors, says they discussed the toll of suicide in their communities and how many people in that room had been affected by friends or family taking their lives. Andrew Collins and Peter Blenkiron believed that Pell’s evidence had been simply the ‘performance of a politician’. ‘I don’t think that what we heard there was the truth—it was a politician’s answers,’ Collins says. But they were focused on the big picture—trying to move on from the decades of dysfunction caused by the abuse in Ballarat and getting Pell’s commitment to get the Catholic Church to contribute to that.
During the conversation, Collins says Pell remained a bit removed. Towards the end, the Cardinal indicated that he needed to go away and prepare a statement for the media, who were waiting outside. ‘So I decided,’ Collins says, ‘to do something, off the cuff. I decided to hug him.
‘And so, I went over and hugged him. And he just changed. He became a bit teary. I mean, who would hug a Cardinal? Anyone?’
Collins says that after that moment, Pell went back to being Ballarat George. His stiff, lofty demeanour dissolved, he became the bloke they had known and gone to in times of need. For a brief moment, all the pain and division and anger dissolved. The Cardinal was just a guy like the rest of them.
Pell went away to write the statement, walked out into the daylight and said words to the gathered reporters that Collins describes as ‘groundbreaking, because it was the first time anyone from the Vatican had linked suicide to the abuse’.
One suicide is too many, and there have been many such tragic suicides: I commit myself to working to try and stop this so that suicide is not seen as an option for those who are suffering.
I too, despite separation of distance, want to make Ballarat a model and better place of healing and for peace … I support the work to feasibility of research centre to advance healing and improve protection … I owe a lot to the people and community of Ballarat; I acknowledge that with deep gratitude. It would be marvellous if our city became well-known as an effective centre and the example of practical help for all those wounded by the scourge of sexual abuse.
After evidence that had been a public relations disaster, he managed, briefly, to turn the ship around.
Bolt later reflected that Pell seemed to have a euphoric sense of relief when he emerged from the meeting. Pell actually choked up when it came to that part of their interview. It was when he was speaking of David Ridsdale, the nephew of Gerald Ridsdale. The charismatic and media-savvy David Ridsdale had been fronting the media and organising logistics as one of the leaders of the survivor group who went to Rome.
David had, famously, accused Pell of trying to ‘bribe’ him when, in 1993, David disclosed his uncle’s abuse during a telephone conversation to Pell at the then Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne’s presbytery at Mentone. David says Pell asked him, ‘I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet’. To which David says he replied, ‘Fuck you, George, and everything you stand for’. The Cardinal, while agreeing that the phone call took place, has always denied that this was said and insisted he would have remembered this if it had.
The public slanging match between the pair had been going on since David first appeared on 60 Minutes in 2002. David gave moving evidence to the Royal Commission about his abuse when it was sitting in Ballarat in May 2015. During that evidence, David also repeated his allegation against Pell.
Seven months after David’s evidence, when the Royal Commission was sitting in Melbourne, Pell’s legal team set about trying to discredit David’s story. A priest came forward as a character witness for Pell—his name was John Walshe. Walshe had been living with Pell at the parish of Mentone in 1993.
Walshe told the Royal Commission that he was in the house with Pell when Pell took the phone call in his office. When Pell came out, he said Pell told him, ‘David is a mess’ and that he felt terribly for him. ‘To my observation, his demeanour was not that of a person that had been in a rude or angry conversation. He did not describe the call to me in that way,’ Walshe said.
Walshe has always been a very close friend of Pell’s. He has been associated with a group of younger, conservative clerics whom Pell championed during his time in the archdiocese, sometimes referred to in the media (including by BA Santamaria’s daughter Mary Helen Woods) as ‘The Spice Girls’. Walshe seemed, prima facie, like a great witness for Pell on that day. Except he wasn’t. It later transpired that when he was asked by Pell’s lawyers to make a statement, a file note said of Walshe’s recollection: ‘In house when call made? Think I was.’ But his sworn statement made it look like he definitely was in the house and he definitely spoke to Pell immediately after the conversation with David. Walshe ultimately agreed with the Royal Commission that it was ‘difficult’ to reconcile his definitive recollection that Pell had spoken to him immediately with the file note.
‘It is likely that parts of Father Walshe’s statement evidence were a reconstruction of what he thought might have occurred rather than his actual recollection of events,’ Furness ultimately submitted. ‘Therefore, it is submitted that Father Walshe was not a credible witness.’
Walshe’s credibility was also given a beating when a witness, John Roach, came forward on ABC TV to say that Walshe had sexually abused him when he was an 18-year-old seminarian. The Catholic Church’s Melbourne Response had paid Roach $75 000 in compensation—the maximum amount available under the scheme at that time. In the eyes of the Church at least, Roach was clearly a deserving recipient of compensation. The accusations against Walshe led to him being banned from ministering in Ireland while he was there on sabbatical, but for some time Archbishop Denis Hart allowed him to continue to be parish priest for two primary schools, describing the Roach matter as simply a ‘breach of his vow of celibacy’. How that accorded with the $75 000 compensation payout is inexplicable and, according to the outraged parents and parishioners of St Patrick’s Mentone, unforgivable. They campaigned furiously to have the priest removed. Finally, in November 2016, almost a year after he gave evidence for Pell and the abuse payout was revealed, Walshe resigned.
The parishioners also campaigned to have a portrait of George Pell, who lived there while Auxiliary Bishop, removed from their school hall after the ABC 7.30 program aired my story about allegations against Pell of child abuse. Parent Claire Bilos told The Age it sent the ‘wrong message’ to children that Cardinal Pell should be ‘revered’ and was ‘above question’. The Catholic Education Office refused to intervene and the painting remained.
The parishioners of Mentone would not have known they had an abuser in their midst had it not been for David Ridsdale’s evidence. I had interviewed David on two earlier occasions and found him thoroughly charming. He would sweep in to the ABC studios and kiss you on the cheek, and call you ‘darls’. What had happened to him as a child was unspeakable and he found a way to express that which cut through. Increasingly, there was a sense though that he was thriving on the media attention. When we chatted off-camera, he spoke repeatedly of how he was being offered money for interviews and how it was expensive to go back and forth from Australia to London, where he had lived for many years. As time went on, something began to sit slightly uncomfortably with me. I wrote it off as the behaviour of someone who had had a ghastly childhood and was understandably severely psychologically affected by it—becoming, in his case, something of an attention-seeker. Still, he was fronting a survivor group and he did an excellent job of spreading the group’s message and at the time they were all enormously grateful to him.
David had also disclosed that he had a skeleton in his closet. He had volunteered that he had had a police conviction as a very young man for something like ‘flashing’. He seemed genuinely contrite about it and said it was his victim’s story to tell, not his. At the time, we reasoned that given what had happened to him as a child, a flashing incident was something that could be understood, if not condoned.
But it turned out that David had seriously minimised that conviction and his victim, Corey Artz, had watched David fronting the cameras in Rome in disgust. Our program received contact from a victim’s advocacy group, Bravehearts, who put the show in contact with Artz. It turns out that the abuse of Artz was far more serious than David had told me. He had also minimised it to other people as well—including the people he went to Rome with. Since then, there has been a major split in the survivor community of Ballarat. Collins says as survivors, they spend their lives fighting the—overwhelmingly false—presumption that they, too, will become offenders because they were victims, and here was David who seemed to prove the theory right. Others say compassion ought to be extended for David’s dreadful childhood. The Australian and 7.30 simultaneously ran stories which featured Artz’s account. From that moment on, David has disappeared from public view.
When Furness wrote her final submissions to the Royal Commission, David’s was one of a handful of stories which Furness found, ultimately, did not really check out. Furness submitted that David was an honest witness, but that it was possible that he had misinterpreted Pell’s offer of assistance as a bribe. She found that there was not sufficient evidence to establish that Pell had sought to bribe David. This has been seized upon by the defenders of Pell to plant a seed of doubt about any claims that Pell knew about abuse and covered it up.
But whatever the sentiment of Pell and his supporters now, it wasn’t like that in Rome when the survivors had their meeting with him. Of all the survivors, Pell singled out his special relationship with David. ‘If there’s one thing in all of these terrible muck-ups I regret, it’s the misunderstanding with him and the way it’s been fought out publicly,’ Pell told Bolt. ‘I mean, I knew the family. I knew his dad. There’s an added grief when you are in a public controversy with somebody whom you in fact like. And whose family you like. So, the reconciliation between us …’ the Cardinal’s voice went quiet and then choked a little, ‘it was deeply moving.’
During that meeting, there was a woman standing in the room who had travelled to Rome with the survivors. Her name was Ingrid Irwin. Irwin is a Ballarat lawyer and, incidentally, a survivor of child sexual abuse herself. She has provided legal advice and friendship to Andrew Collins. But as she stood there, watching the reconciliation that Pell described, Irwin was holding on to information about Pell to which no-one else in the room was privy. Because of that information, she told me, ‘I knew anything he said would be disingenuous … I entered that room with a heavy heart.’ Irwin had a client back in Ballarat. The client had made a statement to Victoria Police about a growing investigation by its Taskforce SANO. That investigation concerned accusations that Pell himself was an abuser of children. And Irwin knew the client was not alone.