Finding the funds to fly fifteen Australian survivors of abuse at the hands of the Catholic church to Rome may have just been the “easy” part. Hearing the live testimony given by Cardinal George Pell to the ongoing royal commission into sexual abuse on children? Significantly harder.
That’s the experience projected by Paul Levey, who spoke to The Project tonight from The Vatican.
“A lot of us didn’t have a lot of sleep last night, so we’ve sort of gone 24 hours without sleep. But we had to do it, we had to be there when he entered the room, and it was pretty important to us.”
When asked about the cardinal’s answers to certain questions, Levey said Pell’s memories didn’t add up; while he could precisely recall details of his education and priesthood, “he pulled out the old ‘oh, I’m having a senior’s moment’” response to some inquisitions about the abuse.
We speak to survivor Paul Levey about hearing Cardinal #Pell‘s testimony in Rome #TheProjectTV https://t.co/XDZM16Wie3
— #TheProjectTV (@theprojecttv) February 29, 2016
Levey also said “we’d like the Cardinal to really recognise that this crime is serious, and it was such a large-scale crime committed by a lot of members of the clergy.”
Tonight’s comments come after he said “we spoke in front of the world, really, so we believe he should feel a little bit of that pressure… we didn’t think it was fair that he would be sitting in the Vatican and testify by video link, practically in his lounge room.”
Critically, Cardinal Pell denied knowledge of paedophile priests in the Ballarat diocese when he was a priest there, and he lambasted the way Gerald Ridsdale was shuttled between parishes – but he maintained he had no knowledge of his abuses at the time.
He’s expected to give evidence for much of the week, with the next session taking place from tomorrow morning. Levey and fourteen others will be there again, too.
Source: The Project.
Photo: Twitter.
