ROME
The Guardian
David Marr
Wednesday 2 March 2016
George Pell must have a nose for the runaround. These days he’s putting the cleaners through ancient Vatican offices which have never ever been audited. Millions are coming to light. He has enemies everywhere. All reports from the Holy See suggest the cardinal is doing well.
But the same man has a sad story to tell of being hoodwinked decades ago by an archbishop, a bishop, his colleagues and even the Catholic Education Office. Yes, the Catholic Education Office of Melbourne failed to give him “anything like adequate information” that might have saved the children of Doveton from the hideous Father Peter Searson.
“They realised very clearly I was not cut from the same cloth,” the cardinal explained. And what was his evidence for that? “I represented a very different approach to matters which became apparent when I became archbishop.”
Yes, but what did he do when he arrived in Melbourne in the 1980s as an auxiliary bishop? He never asked for the files on Searson. He never confronted Archbishop Frank Little. He didn’t rock the boat. “In retrospect I might have been a bit more pushy with all the parties involved.”
When Pell began to sketch the outlines of a grubby conspiracy by the Catholic Education Office to keep him in the dark in order to protect the inaction of Little, both the chair of the commission, Peter McClellan, and counsel assisting Gail Furness SC expressed frank disbelief.
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