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Cardinal George Pell has strongly denied being involved in an alleged sex abuse cover-up and trying to bribe a victim to be quiet.
In a statement, Cardinal Pell renewed his rejection of claims that he helped move paedophile Fr Gerald Ridsdale between parishes and tried to pay one of the victims to remain quiet.
He also denied ignoring 40 years ago another victim’s claim that a now-convicted sex offender was abusing children at a college in Ballarat.
Victims had been speaking at a hearing in Ballarat of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Royal commission chair Justice Peter McClellan said on Wednesday that Cardinal Pell would be required to respond to the allegations.
Cardinal Pell, now finance chief at the Vatican, released a statement later that night.
The cardinal stated he had already addressed many of the claims levelled against him in a Victorian parliamentary inquiry in 2013, and he stood by those statements.
“These matters again require an immediate response and it is important to correct the record, particularly given the false and misleading headlines.”
In evidence at the royal commission in Ballarat on Wednesday, David Ridsdale told of being abused by his uncle, Fr Gerald, from when he was 11.
Mr Ridsdale said he called then-Bishop Pell to tell him about the abuse in February, 1993.
But he said Cardinal Pell asked him “what it will take to keep you quiet” and also talked about the things he will need to buy for his growing family, such as a car.
Mr Ridsdale told the hearing: “I have never stated that Pell offered me anything specific or tangible in our conversation, only that his attempts to direct the conversation down a particular path made me extremely suspicious of his motivations and what he was insinuating.”
A lawyer for the Church at the hearing said Cardinal Pell remembered the conversation differently.
Cardinal Pell added that he had been “horrified once again” by survivors’ accounts of abuse, describing the suicide of so many victims as an enormous tragedy and the crimes committed against them as “profoundly evil and completely repugnant”.
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