AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
April 27, 2016
Rachel Browne
Social Affairs Reporter
Senior Catholic education officials have spoken of their shock and anger at Cardinal George Pell’s evidence to a royal commission that staff had covered up complaints about a paedophile priest.
Cardinal Pell told the royal commission last month that staff from the Catholic Education Office deceived him by failing to give a full account of allegations about Father Peter Searson.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse has heard evidence that Father Searson, who died in 2009, killed a bird in front of children, showed them a dead body in a coffin, held a gun to the heads of parishioners, threatened to stab a child and repeatedly molested youngsters during confession.
Senior staff from the Catholic Education Office in Victoria strongly rejected Cardinal Pell’s evidence that he was not made fully aware of Father Searson’s behaviour while parish priest of Doveton in Melbourne in the 1980s.
Former deputy director of the Catholic Education Office Peter Annett told the royal commission parishioners and staff at Doveton’s Holy Family school would have been “cheering from the rooftops” if Cardinal Pell, then an auxilliary bishop in the Melbourne Archdiocese, had worked to convince then-archbishop Frank Little to remove Father Searson.
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