AUSTRALIA
ABC News
[with video]
By Rachel Carbonell
A Victorian Inquiry into child sexual abuse has heard the former Bishop of Ballarat made a terrible mistake by allowing a known paedophile priest to continue working.
Father Gerald Ridsdale was convicted and jailed for child sexual abuse in 1993 and again in 2006.
The Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into Child Abuse has been told that by 1975 representatives of the Catholic Archdiocese of Ballarat, in Western Victoria, had solid evidence of his crimes but he was not removed from his duties and was instead moved onto other parishes.
The inquiry heard that the bishop in charge of the Ballarat diocese during the time that Ridsdale worked there, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, was not fit to front the inquiry because he had suffered a stroke and now had poor memory.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.