George Pell: what the five-year royal commission into child sexual abuse found

The child sexual abuse royal commission in 2020 released a bombshell un-redacted report examining the failings of George Pell during his time as an assistant priest, bishop, auxiliary bishop and cardinal in Australia.

The report found he both knew about child abuse, particularly within the Victorian diocese of Ballarat, and failed to take proper steps to act on complaints about dangerous priests.

Pell lived with Ridsdale for a time in the 1970s, accompanied him to court in 1993, and offered to provide character evidence for him.

The commission heard that, almost a decade later, Pell was involved in a meeting of the College of Consultors about whether to move Ridsdale from the Mortlake parish in Ballarat to Sydney.

David Ridsdale alleged that in 1983, then bishop Pell offered to bribe him in the hope he would take allegations against his uncle to a church hearing rather than police.

Paedophile Peter Searson, a parish priest who died in 2009, was accused of abusing children in parishes and schools across three districts for more than a decade.

Pell said this was not enough information for him to act.

Graeme Sleeman, a former principal of the Holy Family Parish school in Doveton, said he had repeatedly complained about Searson between 1984 and 1986. The complaints were not acted upon by senior parish staff, so he took his complaints higher, to figures within the archdiocese of Melbourne and the Catholic Education Office, asking for meetings and outlining his concerns.

He told the royal commission he had written numerous letters to then auxiliary bishop Pell.

The royal commission heard that Pell, while an assistant priest in Ballarat in the mid-1970s, knew that Christian Brother Leo Fitzgerald was taking young boys swimming naked.

He did nothing to report it. But the royal commission said it was not unreasonable for priests not to view it as their responsibility to inform the Christian Brothers of such matters.