Updated 06:29 AM EDT, Thu, Mar 28, 2024

Cardinal George Pell Admits Vatican Dismissed Sex Abuse Claims in 1990s

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Australia's most senior Catholic Cardinal George Pell admitted that the Vatican maintained a culture of covering up sex abuse and believed the word of priests over their victims when he appeared before a child abuse inquiry in Sydney on Monday.

Pell, who will step into a new senior role at The Vatican, accused Holy See officials of dismissing the clerical sex abuse scandal in the 1990s, revealing that they were often skeptical of victims and labeled them as enemies of the church.

"The attitude of some people in the Vatican was that if accusations were being made against priests, they were made exclusively or at least predominantly by enemies of the church to make trouble," he said during his testimony before Australia's federal inquiry into allegations of child sex abuse in state and religious institutions, reports the Associated Press.

However, he also credited the Australian church for being far ahead of the Vatican in dealing with abuse by 1995.

Pell went on to apologize for his mistakes in dealing with the case of former altar boy John Ellis, who was sexually abused by a Catholic priest, reports The Guardian. However, he denied that he had ever told Ellis, 52, that he had been the victim of "legal abuse" after his case was defended in the Supreme Court.

According to Ellis, who is now a lawyer, Cardinal Pell used that term when he finally met the cardinal back in 2009, five years after he lost his court case.

"I am unsure what precisely Mr. Ellis meant by legal abuse," Cardinal Pell said. "I did not use the term legal abuse. I did not regard the mere defending the litigation as legal abuse."

Next week, Pell will take on his new role as prefect of the Vatican's Secretariat of the Economy, which is Pope Francis' new finance ministry.

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