George Pell has shifted ground. The news from his latest stint in the box at the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse is that he wasn’t deaf and he wasn’t blind back in the old days in Ballarat.



The cardinal took no body blows. He endured interrogation by Gail Furness SC, counsel assisting the commission, with almost perfect calm. His energy didn’t fail him. In his leathery voice he answered over and again, “That is correct.”



So much of his testimony was familiar. He expressed his regrets. He condemned the failings of the church which he put down to original sin rather than “the divine structure of the church that goes back to the New Testament”.



But he brought something new to the Albergo Quirinale: admissions that he had heard rumours about priests abusing children in the diocese of Ballarat. He had heard complaints. He even admitted knowing about priests kissing and swimming naked with children.



He was not entirely out of the loop.



Since his last appearance in the box, Pell has engaged a team of first-rate lawyers. Perhaps they’ve encouraged him to reflect more deeply on his years in Ballarat when he returned from Oxford with a great career before him in the church.



“My memory is sometimes fallible,” he told the commission. But there seems so much more there than had been supposed. This is encouraging. And the details he gave on Monday save Pell from the fate of simply being disbelieved.



He had heard rumours. Parents raised the issue of abuse with him. So did one or two students. Even priests spoke about it, not as gossip – Pell still deplores gossip – but while “discussing church life”.



Discussing each other’s sexual proclivities, asked Furness? To which the cardinal replied with a hint of reproach, “I very rarely indulged in any such discussions.”



While correcting the impression he didn’t have a clue what was going on back then, Pell left the impression of being remarkably incurious. He seems not to have interrogated his sources. He gave no evidence of investigating the grim suspicions that were raised with him.



In 1974 he heard complaints of “harsh discipline and other infractions possibly of a sexual nature” committed by Brother Edward Dowlan at St Patrick’s College in Ballarat. But he didn’t ask for details. He told the commission, “None of the activities were described except briefly.”



And though he passed what he knew on to the school chaplain, “I made nothing plain to him. I said I’d heard these rumours and was there anything in them?”



Pell now accepts that students, teachers, parents, the school principal and the bishop of Ballarat, Ronald Mulkearns, knew of sexual offending at St Patrick’s at this time in the mid-1970s. Nothing effective was done.



Dowlan was transferred from Ballarat the year complaints reached Pell but he taught for another couple of decades in Christian Brothers schools before being convicted at several trials of multiple charges of child abuse.



Furness wasn’t dueling with Pell. This was more embroidery than sword fighting. She was setting down the details. She took him on a long excursion into the paedophile career of Monsignor John Day of Mildura.



Why? Because the bishop’s advisers, a body known as the College of Consultors, put this paedophile back into a parish after the man’s appalling abuse of children was known to the church.



What was Pell’s view of this, Furness asked. “Quite unacceptable.”



So how will he explain when he returns to the box his own role as a consultor a few years later when the college returned the even more notorious paedophile Gerard Ridsdale to parish after parish?

