AUSTRALIA
The Australian
September 21, 2016
DAN BOX
Crime reporterSydney
@DanBox10
A private meeting of Cardinal George Pell’s staff was allegedly told a senior Catholic cleric would publicly claim that a letter detailing a priest’s confession to child sex abuse had been “embellished”, a royal commission has heard.
File notes tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse show the July 2012 meeting was called after Cardinal Pell told the ABC the priest had made “no admissions” at the time.
Brian Lucas, currently Australian director of Catholic Mission, told the meeting “he would talk to (the letter’s author, Wayne Peters) about … the need for him to say he had embellished it”.
“That would be the end of it and ‘gets him off the hook’. This is the only way ‘to clear this up and explain things’,” Father Lucas is recorded as saying in the file note.
The letter in question detailed a 1992 meeting between pedophile priest John Farrell, Father Lucas and two other priests, John Usher and the late Father Peters. Father Usher, until recently chancellor of the Sydney archdiocese, subsequently told Cardinal Pell that Farrell made no admissions during the meeting.
However, Peters’s letter, written eight days after the meeting, alleged that Farrell admitted sexually assaulting five young boys.
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