AUSTRALIA/ROME
Daily Mail
By AAP and HARRY PEARL FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA
Australia’s most notorious pedophile priest was a tense and unusual man but not someone Cardinal George Pell came to know well despite sharing a house with him.
‘I didn’t warm to him but we never clashed,’ Cardinal Pell told Sky News on Friday, speaking of the 10 months he lived with Gerald Ridsdale at the Ballarat East presbytery where Ridsdale molested an 11-year-old girl in the 1970s.
The country’s now most-senior Catholic said Ridsdale in essence was ‘a mystery man’.
Cardinal Pell said Ridsdale was undoubtedly a capable man and was not someone people complained about to him at the time, even though they might have about other priests.
‘I once celebrated mass after him and I remember his vestments were there and they were sopping wet from some tension or something like that, and I remember noticing that at the time, and I thought him a very tense man,’ he said.
‘But that’s the only particular characteristic [of Ridsdale’s] that I can remember.’
Cardinal Pell also revealed during a lengthy interview with Sky that he later learned a psychiatrist treating Ridsdale in 1975 was contacted by police who said they had held concerns about him but were pleased something was finally being done about him.
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