AUSTRALIA
The Wimmera Mail Times
December 10, 2017
By Brendan Wrigley
IT WILL come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to hear Anne Levey has not stepped foot inside a Catholic church for more than two years.
Her son Paul’s tale of being sent to live with notorious paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale in Mortlake in the 1970s was among the most harrowing heard across more than two years of testimony.
Despite her best efforts to have her teenage son removed from Ridsdale’s control, disgraced former Bishop Ronald Mulkearns claimed he could not fulfill her wish despite knowing of the priest’s abusive history.
Now living in Albury, Ms Levey said her once devout commitment to the cross had evaporated after hearing countless cases of rampant sexual abuse and systematic cover-ups.
“I was totally devastated when I went to the commission. I thought it was just Ridsdale,” Ms Levey said upon hearing of the volume of paedophile priests operating throughout the Ballarat diocese, including towns across the Wimmera.
“I used to go to church every Sunday but I just couldn’t go down to the church now and look a priest in the face.”
While many parishioners such as Ms Levey have chosen to abandon the organisation, others with an intimate understanding of the abuse have found comfort in their faith. However in the wake of the scandal there is a clear, growing groundswell calling for major reform of the Catholic Church’s governance.
Nowhere clearer was the commission’s damning effect on a once mighty institution of western Victoria felt than in the 2016 census, which delivered a blunt critique of the Catholic Church’s standing within Ballarat.
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