AUSTRALIA
ABC – Lateline
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 17/03/2016
Reporter: Steve Cannane
Lateline’s exclusive report as a former Catholic Church co-ordinator reveals former Melbourne Archbishop George Pell prevented her from helping victims of abuse in Doveton, a parish devastated by a notorious paedophile priest.
Transcript
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: A former pastoral care co-ordinator with the Catholic Church in Melbourne has called on the royal commission and police to subpoena all of the Church’s secret files on sexual abuse by clergy. Helen Last has told Lateline that until all the secret documents known internally as the “red files” are made available, the public’s only getting part of the truth about the scope of the crimes committed against children. She also says that former Melbourne Archbishop George Pell preventing her from helping victims of abuse in Doveton, a parish devastated by the notorious paedophile priest Peter Searson. Steve Cannane has our exclusive report.
STEVE CANNANE, REPORTER: Do you still have the support of the Pope, Cardinal?
GEORGE PELL, CARDINAL: Counsel, this was an extraordinary world, a world of crimes and cover-ups.
HELEN LAST, FMR CO-ORDINATOR, PASTORAL RESPONSE OFFICE: It was surprising for me to hear him say that it was a world of crimes and cover-ups, whereas in days before he’d been saying he knew nothing, he saw nothing, he was never told anything, and then he called it a world of crimes and cover-ups.
STEVE CANNANE: In 1997, Helen Last was the co-ordinator of the Pastoral Response Office for the Melbourne Archdiocese. She says then Archbishop Pell personally stopped her from going to Doveton parish to investigate and provide care to the victims of the notorious paedophile priest Father Peter Searson.
HELEN LAST: They did not want our pastoral work on that professional level to start in that area because it was so full of sexual crimes and terrible trauma and terrorisation of altar boys. They did not want us to be working there to be uncovering it and to helping people specifically who had suffered that.
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