St Alipius Presbytery in Ballarat holds dark history of child sexual abuse

By Lucie Morris-Marr
Herald Sun
May 09, 2015

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/st-alipius-presbytery-in-ballarat-holds-dark-history-of-child-sexual-abuse/story-fni0fee2-1227347429086

St Alipius Presbytery in Ballarat was a place of vile and damaging abuse.

Brother Edward Dowlan.

Father Gerald Francis Ridsdale in 1994.

Robert Charles Best leaves a court.

FROM the outside, the red-brick St Alipius Presbytery, with its clean white metalwork and gothic features, looks pretty in that whimsical way many enjoy in historical properties.

But in just over a week, when the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse begins its public hearings in Ballarat, very far from pretty echoes of its past will be recalled.

We will learn anew that for many, perhaps hundreds, in Victoria this house is a haunting reminder of the terror, the vile and damaging abuse, inflicted on them within its walls.

It was the early 1970s. They should have been enjoying a carefree childhood. They should have been safe. Protected. And above all, cared for by the staff of the St Alipius school, church, and presbytery.

But instead, they were caught up in what turned out to be the worst paedophile ring cver recorded in Australia.

Many of them were raped, fondled and molested on a daily basis by four of the male teacher Christian Brothers.

And leading this twisted, abusive victory charge was the man their parents trusted the most: the Father of St Alipius Catholic Church, Gerald Francis Ridsdale.

As adults, the victims have bravely given victim impact statements in court during the course of many trials involving the teachers.

Ridsdale himself has faced four trials alone for offences relating to 54 children, and is now serving his fourth jail term as a result.

He will be eligible for parole in four years.

Juries in Melbourne courtrooms have listened as victims told how, as children in the St Alipius community, they would find themselves cornered either by Ridsdale or one of the teachers.

They would be trapped in the sick bay, in the back of classrooms or in church pews — all the time being told that they had sinned; that they had been naughty; that they deserved it.

This manipulative mental abuse was inflicted as frequently as the physical attacks.

Sometimes, in the worst instances, they were carried on back in the privacy of the darkened bedrooms of the presbytery.

While the details of each offence is different, the testimonies in court share the same theme.

All of them went through hell at the hands of those who were supposed to be in the service of God.

Many have never recovered. According to child abuse advocacy group Broken Rites, up to 50 suicides have been linked to the abuse.

One of Ridsdale’s victims, who endured an attack within the presbytery itself, wasn’t even a member of the parish community.

She had been visiting her aunt nearby.

But it didn’t make her immune to a vile attack.

She told how, at the age of 11, she had joined some other children playing in the schoolyard of St Alipius when she fell over and hurt her knees.

“Ridsdale gave her a piggyback to the parish house and sat her on the kitchen bench near the sink,” a court heard at Ridsdale’s fourth court hearing last year, at which a total of 84 offences against the girl and 13 other children were dealt with.

“He removed her tracksuit pants and was wiping the blood off her legs. He then started cuddling her and kissing her face.”

The victim was then told by Ridsdale she had been “naughty”.

“He started talking to me about how naughty my father had told him that I was in relation to running away, being disobedient, not doing my jobs at home, and he seemed to have forgotten about my knees.”

Ridsdale then carried the victim up the hallway of the presbytery towards the front door and into a room with no beds. He put her down and made her stand facing a window with her back to him. The victim then heard the sound of Ridsdale taking his belt off.

She also heard the sound of a drawer opening and desperately tried to run out of the room to escape, but she fell over in the hallway.

“Ridsdale then picked (the victim) up from the floor and took her back into the room,” said the court summary of her statement.

“In the room she saw a white jar on the desk.

“Ridsdale closed the door to the room and told (the victim) that she was naughty for running away from home and that she had to be punished and repent for her sins.”

Ridsdale then raped her.

“I remember feeling totally paralysed and trapped and not being able to move,” the victim said in her statement.

“I remember feeling pain. He was saying stuff like how bad I was and that I had to be punished.

“I don’t know how it ended, it just did.

“I just remember going back to the kitchen and I got my tracksuit pants and left.”

But the nightmare didn’t end there. The victim was sexually abused again in the confession box at the side of the church.

Ridsdale, in the confessional, molested her after having had her kneel and say: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned and with God’s help I will not sin again. Oh my God, I am very sorry that I have sinned against you. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“I just remember it being absolutely revolting and I was choking and I felt like I was dying,” she said later.

In the years following Ridsdale’s reign of terror at St Alipius, his accusers were silenced or dismissed.

Instead, church authorities moved Ridsdale around to other parishes, including Elsternwick in 1980 and Horsham in 1986.

It was only after he returned from a posting in New Mexico that Ridsdale was finally charged with child sexual abuse offences for the first time.

In 1993, he was charged in connection with 30 incidents relating to abuse carried out between 1974 and 1980.

Enraging victims support groups and creating headlines, Cardinal George Pell, then a bishop in Melbourne, was photographed accompanying Ridsdale to the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court to face the charges for the first time.

Pell had been a young priest who had moved into the St Alipius presbytery for a year in 1973.

Then an ambitious Catholic high-flyer in his early 30s, who grew up in Ballarat, Cardinal Pell is now Australia’s most senior Catholic figure.

Last year, Pope Francis appointed him “Cardinal-Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy”.

Cardinal Pell, who returned to Ballarat from training in Oxford and Rome in 1971, has confirmed that he lived in the house in 1973.

He had been working in his first job as an assistant priest in Swan Hill, and was placed in charge of the Catholic education system in the Ballarat diocese.

Cardinal Pell was already familiar with Ridsdale, both having attended St Patrick’s College in Ballarat.

Cardinal Pell has consistently and vehemently denied any knowledge of Ridsdale’s abuse.

“I lived there with him (Ridsdale) and there was not even a whisper,” he said in 1996, just before he was sworn in as Archbishop of Melbourne.

“It was a different age. It was never mentioned.”

In May 2013, at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into Institutional Child Abuse, Cardinal Pell admitted that his accompanying Ridsdale to court had been a “mistake”, but he had felt sorry for him.

“I realise that was a mistake ... I’ve always been on the side of victims,” he said.

“Priests regularly visit people in jails. He was at the absolute bottom of the pile.”

As for the other four teachers who abused children at St Alipius, one of them, Brother Gerald Fitzgerald, died before any charges could be brought against him.

Another teacher, Stephen Francis Farrell, pleaded guilty in 2013 to a fresh charge of indecent assault on a 10-year-old boy in St Alipius in 1974.

He was given a three-month jail term, but he has appealed.

Two of the paedophile teachers are currently behind bars: Robert Best was jailed in August 2011 for nine years and 11 months for assaults against 11 victims at St Alipius and other schools.

Edward Dowlan was jailed in March this year for abusing 20 boys as young as eight between 1971 and 1986. He had previously been jailed in 1996 for 6½ years for abusing 11 children.

During Dowlan’s most recent trial, one victim said he had been at a Ballarat swimming pool in 1973 when he told Cardinal Pell something had to be done to stop Dowlan abusing young boys at St Patrick’s College.

He said Cardinal Pell replied: “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Cardinal Pell has denied this allegation.

At Ballarat hearings beginning on May 19, the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse will focus on the “disturbing history” of St Alipius school and parish.

But it also wants to hear from “residents, students and others” about the impact of their experiences of child sexual abuse at St Joseph’s Home. It was mostly a home for boys aged between six and 16 from 1911 to 1980, when it was closed down.

They are also appealing for anyone who experienced sexual abuse at St Patrick’s Christian Brothers Boys’ Primary School.

It was replaced in 1982 by St Patrick’s Parish Primary School, on the same site.

Finally, the hearing will focus on the town’s St Patrick’s College, a Catholic day and boarding school that is still operated by the Christian Brothers.

Naturally, teachers, staff and parents in the Ballarat community are bracing themselves for the start of the hearings, when still more horrific details may emerge and yet more victims may come forward.

A father of a child who attends St Alipius Primary School told the Herald Sun parents and staff would rather move forward from the past.

“It’s hard, as they want to go into the future to put this behind them.

“But we all keep getting reminded of it,” he said.

Many more stories from this dark chapter in Victoria’s history may well emerge as these hearings unfold.