AUSTRALIA
The Age
March 7, 2016
Phil Cleary
Church leaders were not doing anything that unusual when they covered for Ridsdale and his ilk.
Was anyone not moved to despair, or maybe even outrage, watching Cardinal George Pell’s evidence at the royal commission on child sexual abuse? Even if Pell didn’t know, as implausible as it looks, that Father Gerald Ridsdale and a cabal of priests and brothers was systematically raping children in the 1970s and ’80s, his church’s guilt is palpable.
Why was Pell, a big strong outspoken man in his younger years, so timid when a generation of children was being terrorised by cowardly, sadistic brothers and priests? If he’d been a reserved, retiring kind of man we might have imagined he didn’t have the nerve to confront those who covered for Ridsdale and his like. But Pell is not that kind of man. He’s never flinched in a public debate about Catholic doctrine or the failings of sinners. A man of the old world, George Pell was never one to mince his words.
Yet when acting as a “consultor” to Bishop Ronald Mulkearns it seems he never asked one forthright question about why a known sadistic “sinner”, Ridsdale, was being moved from parish to parish. All the while, says Pell, those with knowledge of these crimes either lied to or failed to confide in him. Whatever the truth of what he knew, there can be no mistaking his indifference to the lives of young boys at Catholic schools. While some men in his predicament might have shed a tear for those who have suffered, the cardinal from Ballarat is made of sterner stuff. His testimony was all about survival and proving that, because he was ignorant of the crimes, he had no moral culpability.
Now that we’ve established the church’s culpability, we need to answer other, very serious questions. Why could men supposedly called to God act so sadistically? Were there reasons, other than the protection of the church’s name, that induced its leaders to protect those men engaged in a brutal misuse of power? Were some church elders burdened by what they believed were their own guilty secrets?
Just as importantly, we must ask what part notions of male entitlement played in the crimes about which Pell has been interrogated. It’s all too convenient to reduce these crimes to the acts of “evil paedophiles”, as if men weren’t committing the same crimes against women and children with impunity in the broader society.
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