Bishop Moved Priests Who Abused Children between Parishes, Royal Commission Hears
The Guardian
A Victorian bishop says he tried to protect the church’s reputation and ensure pedophile priests did not offend again but regrets he did not handle it differently. Ronald Mulkearns, the bishop of Ballarat from 1971 to 1997, said he retired early because he was not handling the problem of a number of cases of pedophilia in the diocese as well as he should have. “I certainly regret that I didn’t deal differently with pedophilia,” he told the child abuse royal commission on Thursday. “We had no idea, or I had no idea, of the effects of the incidents that took place.” The commission has heard Mulkearns knew about priests who abused children and moved them between parishes, also sending some for treatment. The counsel assisting the commission Gail Furness SC put to the bishop that he chose to protect the church’s reputation over protecting children in the way he dealt with the abuse complaints. Bishop Mulkearns said that was not completely true. “I certainly wanted to protect the reputation of the church,” he said. “I wanted to make sure these incidents didn’t happen in the future and tried my best to work in such a way that it wouldn’t happen in the future but, of course, they weren’t telling you the truth about what was happening, so it made it difficult to deal with them.” Mulkearns said he tried to get treatment for priests over the incidents he knew about but said there were a lot of other incidents where “they simply weren’t admitting them”. “I took notice of what the psychologists said about them and in particular, of course, when they decided it was OK for them to go back into a parish,” he said.
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