AUSTRALIA
The Age
[with video]
Barney Zwartz
Poor Cardinal Pell, always the victim of such appalling deception and lies by those he should have been able to trust.
If only he had known the truth about goings on in Ballarat and Doveton with abusive priests Gerald Ridsdale and Peter Searson, matters would have been so different.
That was the line Cardinal Pell ran consistently before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Wednesday, and he held it in the face of obvious incredulity by commission chairman Justice Peter McClellan and senior counsel Gail Furness, who frankly told him his evidence was implausible and designed to deflect blame from himself.
Cardinal Pell replied: “Counsel, I can only tell you the truth, the whole story of Searson is implausible and the cover-up is equally implausible. I can only tell you the way it was.”
This alleged conspiracy against Pell was the day’s new development. He has criticised former church leaders but this is the first we have heard of a long-standing pattern of deception.
Mind you, Pell never had a duty to do more in his view, because that duty always belonged to others. At most, he “might have pushed a bit harder”.
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