ROME
CBC News (Canada)
The Associated Press Posted: Mar 01, 2016
The lawyer for an Australian inquiry into child sex abuse suggested on Wednesday that one of Pope Francis’s top advisers was lying when he denied knowledge of criminal allegations swirling around two notorious pedophile priests decades ago.
Australian Cardinal George Pell insisted he was telling the truth, testifying to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that he had changed a culture of “crimes and coverups” within the Catholic Church.
Pell, the pope’s chief financial adviser, told the royal commission in three days of evidence this week that he was deceived twice by church authorities about child abuse allegations against priests Gerald Ridsdale and Peter Searson.
Pell said that as an assistant priest in the Australian city of Ballarat in the 1970s, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns had not told him that Ridsdale was repeatedly moved within the diocese because of pedophilia allegations.
Pell also said that as an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne in the early 1990s, the Catholic Education Office and Archbishop Frank Little had concealed from him accusations of pedophilia against Searson.
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