Inside The Shame Of George Pell

Television reporter Louise Milligan spent three years investigating George Pell and the Catholic Church and what she discovered has made her question her church and the justice system.

- Louise Milligan

I was raised a devoted Catholic. Mass every Sunday, confession, giving up sweets for Lent. At school we recited Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy and at lunchtime didn’t step on lines on the pavement lest it be declared that we loved the devil. It’s perhaps that upbringing that, in 2015, drew me to cover the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse for ABC’s 7.30 program. That year, I met a woman, Julie Stewart, who was the same age as me. Julie had been raised in a parish across Melbourne from where I grew up. I’ll never forget seeing her First Communion photo – eyes cast to the heavens, her starchy white dress, veil and stiff crown of artificial flowers, her frilly socks and little patent leather shoes. Julie’s photo was just like mine from when I was eight. It reminded me of the innocent hope we all grew up with.

Julie had all of that hope and innocence dashed when she was abused in the confessional by a thoroughly horrible human called Father Peter Searson, a Brylcreemed paedophile priest who carried a gun around the parish school at Doveton, in Melbourne’s south-east, where he terrorised the children.

Many years later, when he was giving evidence to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into child abuse, Cardinal George Pell denied knowing about sexual abuse at Doveton, saying only “there might be victims”. But as we discovered for our program, in 1998 Pell, then Archbishop of Melbourne, had sent Julie a letter apologising for the abuse and paying her a confidential settlement through his Melbourne Response scheme. It made me think two things: First, I should investigate this man more because I had serious questions about whether he was a truth-teller.

Second, that I could so easily have been that little Catholic girl whose trust was betrayed.