George Pell didn’t report allegation of sexual abuse by priest because he ‘wasn’t asked to’

ROME
The Daily Telegraph

Andrew Carswell
The Daily Telegraph

CARDINAL George Pell chose not to report a serious allegation that a priest was sexually abusing boys at a Victorian Catholic school because the student who warned him about the abuse “wasn’t asking me to do anything about it’’.

In his final day in the witness stand in Rome in front of the royal commission into child sexual abuse, Australia’s most senior Catholic confirmed a St Patricks College student complained to him in 1974 that priest Ted Dowlan was “misbehaving with boys’’.

Cardinal Pell confessed he did nothing with the “very serious” allegation.

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.