AUSTRALIA
Who
Louise Talbot – Who on March 18, 2016
After the second night of Cardinal George Pell’s testimony in Rome’s Quirinale Hotel on March 1, Anthony Foster was heading towards his Quirinale room when he ran into Pell on the lobby staircase.
Foster, whose daughters were sexually abused by a priest, had flown to Italy to hear Pell’s evidence for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
He called Pell’s name and then pleaded with the cardinal to discuss the Catholic Church’s dealings with child abuse in Melbourne.
But Australia’s most senior Catholic, “said something negative, like ‘I can’t do that,’” Foster tells WHO. “I looked him in the eye … I said, ‘You are looking at a broken man.’ I don’t know where the words came from.” Pell then walked off. Adds Foster: “There was no offer at all to do anything.”
Foster is on a crusade to end that familiar response. From 1987, Foster and wife Chrissie’s daughters Emma and Katie were raped by priest Kevin O’Donnell at Sacred Heart Primary School in Melbourne’s Oakleigh, when they were 5 and 6.
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