AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
May 31, 2013
IN evidence at the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse on Monday this week, Cardinal George Pell talked about “gossips” and how he wasn’t one.
If he had been, and if other Catholic Church leaders had been “gossips”, maybe they “would have realised earlier just how widespread this awful business was”, he said, referring to the Church’s child sex abuse crisis.
He seemed to be saying that if only the cardinal and a few brother bishops had had a nice old chin-wag in the tearoom after formal proceedings at, say, the twice-yearly Australian Bishops Conferences, the Catholic Church might have acted much sooner to arrest a national tragedy.
If only they’d traded the latest rumours about priests A, B and C and their tendency to invite young children to their private quarters with the doors shut at odd times, maybe the penny might have dropped, Pell seemed to be saying.
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.