AUSTRALIA
The Australian
One should never speak ill of the dead as the saying goes. I think we can rule it out in the case of the former Bishop of Ballarat Ronald Austin Mulkearns who died yesterday. He was 85 years of age.
Mulkearns’ predecessor, James Patrick O’Collins was five months shy of his 95th birthday when he passed away in 1983. Bishops tend to live long lives. Maybe it’s because they don’t have to worry about lay concerns like paying the mortgage or the rent or even where their next meal is coming from. Perhaps bishops like O’Collins and Mulkearns lived such long lives because God was not so keen to have them join him.
Both bishops oversaw and facilitated the activity of paedophile priests in the Ballarat Diocese. There are literally thousands of victims in the post-war to present period. Giving evidence at the Royal Commission in February, Mulkearns stammered out apologies and claimed he did not know what to do when it came to paedophile priests. He was, he said, simply ill equipped to deal with marauding serial offenders like Gerald Ridsdale and Monsignor John Day.
Last night I saw an SBS news report on Mulkearns’ death. The report concluded by saying Mulkearns had never reported offending clerics to police. It was a rookie mistake for any journalist who has put a toe into the foul water of the Ballarat Diocese. Of course Mulkearns had never reported to police that his priests had raped children. The real story is the cops came to him.
In the mid-1990s, Victoria Police looked to charge Mulkearns for his role in protecting and facilitating paedophile priests but the charges did not proceed. The truth is the police had plenty to charge Mulkearns with but that would mean opening up a dirty secret and one Victoria Police would hold close for more than forty years.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.