AUSTRALIA
Al Jazeera
Jarni Blakkarly | 03 Mar 2016
Sydney, Australia – Sitting alone on a bench in Sydney’s busy financial district, Darren Chalmers is surrounded by dozens of placards condemning the Roman Catholic Church’s response to child sex abuse victims like himself.
Inside the building behind him, around 50 people, including a dozen victims, watch one of the Vatican’s most powerful clergymen, Cardinal George Pell, testify, via a videolink from a hotel in Rome, as to what he knew about decades of sexual abuse within the church.
Over four days of hearings for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, 48-year-old Chalmers, who was sexually abused at the age of 14 at a boy’s school in Melbourne, sat outside with signs, some which read “Pell go to hell” and “Pope Sack Pell Now”. He wasn’t able to bring himself to join the other victims inside the hearing.
“Being in there feels too uncomfortable, it brings back memories of things I try and forget. But sitting out here, I do feel proud, people see me and I’m helping myself and other victims who can’t be here,” Chalmers told Al Jazeera.
After he swore on the Bible on Monday, Pell’s gruelling questioning lasted almost 20 hours over the four days and focused on what he knew about sexual abuse in his small hometown of Ballart and in the city of Melbourne between the 1970s and 1990s as he rose in the Catholic Church hierarchy.
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