Pell is falsely accused? That judgement is as premature as the presumption of his guilt.
MM is of course fully entitled to disbelieve any of these allegations that go back decades, but allegations of sexual assaults going back several decades have been known to be true. It's impossible to deny in light of father Ridsdale pleading guilty in 1993 to sexually assaulting 54 victims, some of whom he assaulted as early as 1961. Coincidentally, George Pell, then an assistant Bishop in Ballarat, was Ridsdale's support person when the matter went to court. Here he is accompanying the monster to one of the court sessions.
A couple of months ago Ridsdale pleaded guilty to more sexual abuse involving another eleven children during that period. Bishop James O' Collins warned him in 1962 to control his sexual urges, but when the priest failed to do so he was simply shunted from one parish to the next, only to find another batch of underage candidates to rape. After Ballarat he was sent to the parishes of Mildura, Swan Hill, Warrnambool, Ballarat East, Apollo Bay, Inglewood, Edenhope, Mortlake and Horsham, all in Victoria, as well as a couple of stints in New South Wales and one in the USA. There simply is no way his superiors, Pell among them, were unaware of what he got up to, or whom.
Regardless of the truth of the allegations made against the Cardinal, I'd love to see him stripped of his office and incarcerated for his protection of sexual predators among the clergy and his failure to do anything about the pervasive problem they constituted. Father Ridsdale was the most notorious of them, at least in Australia, but he certainly was not the only one.
