ROME
Sydney Morning Herald
[with video]
March 4, 2016
Nick Miller and Melissa Cunningham
Cardinal George Pell has pledged to help those “wounded by the scourge of sexual abuse”, in the final act of his appearance at the child sex abuse Royal Commission.
“One suicide is too many, and there have been many such tragic suicides,” the cardinal said on the doorstep of the Rome hotel where over four nights he was grilled about what he knew of paedophile priests in Melbourne and Ballarat in the 1970s and 1980s.
“I commit myself to working … to try to stop this so that suicide is not seen as an option for those who are suffering,” the cardinal said.
The statement, handwritten on hotel notepaper, was the product of an hour-long meeting he held with a group of survivors who had travelled to Rome to watch the cardinal give video evidence to the Commission.
Cardinal Pell said he had heard each of their stories and of their suffering.
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