ROME
Vatican Radio
(Vatican Radio) Cardinal George Pell on Thursday met for nearly two hours with about a dozen victims of sexual abuse from the Australian Diocese of Ballarat at the Quirinale hotel in Rome.
Cardinal Pell has been giving testimony this week to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse, which looking into sexual abuse at different institutions in Australia.
The Diocese of Ballarat, located in the State of Victoria, has had several clerics and religious accused of abuse during a 30-year period from the 1960’s, and over a dozen suicides have been attributed to the abuse. Cardinal Pell was ordained for the Diocese of Ballarat in 1966.
After the meeting, Cardinal Pell called the encounter “honest and occasionally emotional,” and acknowledged “the evil that was done.”
“We all want to try to make things better actually and on the ground especially for the survivors and their families and I undertake to continue to help the group work effectively with the committees and agencies that we have here in the Church in Rome and especially the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors,” Cardinal Pell said.
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