AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
May 26, 2015
Rory Callinan
Investigative journalist
Catholic Church superiors knew a remorseless paedophile priest was a self-confessed child abuser when they quietly shifted him to Sydney where he went on to prey on children around the southern beaches.
The cover-up involving former Victorian Father Gerald Ridsdale and his crimes in NSW in the 1980s has been detailed for the first time in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Now defrocked and considered to be Australia’s worst paedophile priest, Ridsdale has been convicted of abusing dozens of children in Victoria and faces further investigation relating to untold other assaults.
Statements, correspondence and interviews submitted to the commission, detail how the paedophile was able to maintain his criminal behaviour in New South Wales before being returned to Victoria and then quietly shipped off to a special clinic for sex-abusing priests in New Mexico in 1989.
They reveal Ridsdale had been transferred to the Catholic Enquiry Centre CEC then at Maroubra in 1982 despite his superior, Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, being aware of Ridsdale admitting to sexually assaulting a child in 1975. Other allegations had also surfaced in 1981.
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