ROME
National Catholic Reporter
Joshua J. McElwee | Mar. 2, 2016
ROME
Cardinal George Pell, one of the highest-ranking officials at the Vatican, has admitted to an Australian government commission that when a schoolboy came to him decades ago to report that a Catholic teacher was “misbehaving with boys” he did not report the matter to authorities.
Pell, who served as the leader of two Australia archdioceses before becoming the head of Pope Francis’ new centralized Vatican treasury department two years ago, said that when the boy came to him in the mid-1970s “he just mentioned it casually in conversation; he never asked me to do anything.”
The boy, the cardinal said, was complaining about a member of the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers named Edward Dowlan, who would later be convicted of abusing at least 20 boys at six Australian schools starting in 1971.
Pell told the Australian Royal Commission via video testimony from Rome late Wednesday night Rome time that the child came to him to say “something like ‘Dowlan is misbehaving with boys.'”
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