Cardinal Pell to Give Evidence in Victorian Clergy Child Abuse Inquiry

By Paul Bleakley
The Australian Times UK
April 2, 2013

http://www.australiantimes.co.uk/news/in-australia/cardinal-pell-to-give-evidence-in-victorian-clergy-child-abuse-inquiry.htm


CATHOLIC Cardinal George Pell will appear before a Victorian inquiry into child sexual abuse within weeks, at a time when the church has proposed sweeping changes to its handling of complaints of abuse against members of the clergy.

Pell was a driving force behind the introduction of a controversial process for dealing with complaints of abuse in Victoria while serving as Archbishop of Melbourne during the 1990s. This practice involved the Catholic Church investigating alleged abuse in-house and encouraging victims to avoid going to the police with their claims.

It is expected that current Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart and a range of other church officials will give evidence to the inquiry. Spokesman for the Catholic Church Shane Mackinlay said that the Victorian inquiry had been given “unfettered” access to files detailing over 600 allegations of abuse that had been investigated by the Victorian wing of the church since Pell’s complaints process was introduced.

Mackinlay said: “The committee has indicated some interest in Cardinal Pell attending and he’s certainly willing to co-operate with that.”

The Catholic Church’s proposed reforms to its complaints handling procedure will include a petition to amend the Crimes Act to allow priests to report allegations of abuse to police without identifying the victims or the individual making the complaint. The proposed changes to church reporting procedure would continue to protect complaints made during confession from being passed on to law enforcement agencies.

Cardinal Pell publically rejected claims made at the Victorian inquiry earlier this week that he had been present in 1969 when a child had accused another priest of rape. Pell said that Melbourne lawyer Vivian Waller’s claims were “seriously defamatory” and could be seen as professional misconduct.

Waller told the inquiry last October that Pell had refused to accept the 1969 complaint against a fellow priest in Ballarat, however had heard the boy relate the allegation of rape to another member of the clergy. Pell’s media director Katrina Lee said that Pell was not in Australia when the alleged offence occurred and did not go to Ballarat until 1971.

Lee said: “It is of some concern that Dr Waller made these false allegations against Cardinal Pell and then failed to retract them when it became apparent to her that they could not have been true. False accusations such as this are not only seriously defamatory but can (in certain circumstances) amount to a contempt of Parliament and professional misconduct. At the very least, the inquiry, the media and the public has been seriously misled.”

A range of experts have told the Victorian inquiry that an estimated one in fifteen Melbourne priests has committed an child abuse offence at one point in their career and that Catholic priests offend at a rate six times higher than the clergy of other denominations combined.  The Victorian inquiry is a precursor to the upcoming Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which will be presided over by Justice Peter McClellan AM over the next year.