Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s treasurer, said he did nothing when a boy at a Christian Brothers school in rural Victoria state mentioned the behaviour “casually in conversation” in the mid-1970s.
“With the experience of 40 years later, certainly I would agree that I should have done more,” Pell said while giving evidence via video link from Rome to Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse.
Pell’s four-day questioning over cases involving hundreds of children in Australia from the 1960s to the 1990s has taken on wider implications about the accountability of church leaders, given his high rank within the church.
There were audible gasps when, during a testy exchange earlier in the week, Pell said of abuse by a priest who was later convicted of 138 offences against 53 victims: “It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me.”
Pell said on Wednesday he regretted the comment, which was seized upon by victims and the Australian media as evidence of the Catholic Church’s uncaring attitude.
“I was very confused, I responded poorly ... it was badly expressed,” he said on the last day of the hearing, which required him to give evidence late at night through to the early hours in Italy.
Pell has told the inquiry that the church made “enormous mistakes” and “catastrophic” choices by refusing to believe abused children, shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish and over-relying on counselling of priests to solve the problem.
Pell also said he was deceived and lied to by superiors as a young priest in the 1970s. He denied that, as a bishop in the 1990s, he tried to bribe one victim to remain silent and that he ignored complaints, or that he was complicit in the transfer of a paedophile priest.
