Ridsdale victim says he's 'not so powerful'

Sky News
May 27, 2015

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2015/05/27/ridsdale-victim-says-he-s--not-so-powerful-.html

Stephen Woods stood up to get a closer look at the 81-year-old in the dark green prison jumper on the screen.

The priest who had raped the 14-year-old after he had gone to him for advice about his sexuality was no longer two to three times his size.

'When I stood up and looked at him, he was my size,' Mr Woods said of seeing Gerald Francis Ridsdale.

'This time I wasn't a kid, I was a man.

'I saw him and I thought, You know, you're not so powerful any more'.'

Mr Woods hasn't seen Ridsdale since the second of his four court cases, when he was jailed in 1994 for 18 years for abusing Mr Woods and 20 other victims.

Though hurt that Ridsdale doesn't remember the names of any of his victims, Mr Woods is focused on the child sex abuse royal commission uncovering the full story behind the widespread abuse by clergy in the Ballarat diocese.

'We know as he said to his sister that there were hundreds of victims', so the fact that you're not even remembered doesn't even matter. He's in jail.'

It is Ridsdale's lack of memory of what the Catholic Church and its leaders knew about him that has really angered victims.

'He could have been stopped before he raped me,' Mr Woods, 53, said.

'So many of these people, much of this crime could have been stopped if only people had taken the right and the moral and the spiritual attitude to stop these monsters, and they didn't.

'They only thought about the Church.'

David Ridsdale was still processing the impact of seeing his uncle and abuser giving evidence via videolink from jail to the royal commission.

'I'm just having to keep it bottled up and I will deal with that later,' he said.

'I was pleased he didn't look like my grandfather.'

For David Ridsdale and others, the defrocked priest's 'selective Vatican memory' has left them with more questions instead of the answers they had hoped to hear.

David Ridsdale said it was the first time he had heard his uncle admit he hurt children, and he and clergy abuse victim Andrew Collins were cynical about the admission.

'I don't think anybody looked at that and felt that that was heartfelt at all,' Mr Collins said.