Failures of church and state created monster Gerald Ridsdale

On the basis of convictions, numbers of victims and number of offences, Ridsdale is the worst sex offender in this country’s history. While Ridsdale’s defence team laughably called for the prospect of parole, he must die in jail.

I read a copy of one man’s victim impact statement over the weekend. It made me weep. It was no surprise that, when he delivered it to the court yesterday, County Court Judge Irene Lawson also broke down in tears. The court adjourned briefly while the judge composed herself. In all ten of the 11 victims in this round of prosecutions provided statements, detailing lives in disarray, filled with emotional, lifelong pain, surviving rather than living.

Despite having their moments in court, the mystical, magical word ‘closure’ and all it connotes continues to elude them.

The obvious question is how did a pedophile priest, active for thirty years or more, with more than 60 victims having now come forward, escape justice for so long? Ridsdale had been offending against children from the moment he became a priest in 1962. He was first convicted of child sex offending in 1993.

The answer, in part, lies in the conduct of the Ballarat diocese under Bishop Mulkearns and his predecessor, Bishop James O’Collins. These senior figures within the Church, effectively the chief executive officers of the Ballarat diocese were aware of Ridsdale’s offending and merely shuffled him around the diocese to new parishes and new groups of children.

I could mount a very solid argument that the Ballarat diocese was a criminal organisation. Certainly it behaved as if it was, destroying evidence, perverting the course of justice, facilitating monstrous crimes, aiding and abetting the rape of children and then covering it up and moving the offending priests on when the protests from parishioners grew too loud.

The usual modus operandi of this sociopathic priest and others like him, was to prey on vulnerable children, kids battling emotionally with their families in distress due to marital breakdown, illness in the family or often when the parents or guardians were regarded as so devout they would never believe their children had they come forward and reported being raped by a priest.

In that respect, Ridsdale was a cold, calculating criminal. But by the time he was shanghaied to Mortlake in Victoria’s west in the early 1980s, he was out of control. He still stuck to his ruse of preying on especially vulnerable kids but his M.O. had started to change. He had begun raping kids spontaneously, opportunistically.

In the last day, we have also heard the incomprehensible and appalling crime of a father bringing his pre-teen aged daughter to Ridsdale and presenting her to the priest to be sexually assaulted.

Ridsdale’s actions were those of a man who did not fear consequence. He did not fear it because he had learned that he would not be held to account. The diocese would do nothing more than require his removal from one parish before moving him onto another. More significantly, he understood the police would do nothing.

This may be an old story to some but it needs to be repeated. In 1972 in Mildura a police detective, Denis Ryan sought to prosecute a paedophile priest, Monsignor John Day. Like Ridsdale, Day’s victims number in the hundreds. Day was protected by the most senior detective in Mildura, Detective Sergeant Jim Barritt. When Ryan sought assistance from senior Victoria Police, all hell broke loose. Ultimately Ryan had his career destroyed by senior police while Day was removed from the Mildura parish under the watchful eyes of the police and their co-conspirator, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns. He was let loose on another parish where he offended again.

Day was never charged and died unpunished in 1978.

Consider what lessons Ridsdale might have learned from this scandal. He and other paedophile priests in the diocese had effectively been given the green light. They could prey on children with impunity.

What lessons could be learned for victims? They learned the hard lesson that there was no point in coming forward. The fix was in. Is it any wonder under these circumstances that victims took on average more than two decades to report to police while many, many others will never come forward?

Members of VicPol understood precisely what had happened to Ryan. Many privately sympathised with him. But the lesson for them was, don’t open that disgraceful can of worms. It will cost you your job.

What we do know is the rate of offending escalated in the wake of the Mildura scandal. Ridsdale, who had been present in Mildura in the late 1960s and offended against children there, came to the view that he could rape children without ever being brought to book.

Consider, too, what might have happened had Day been charged and prosecuted in 1972 as he should have been. In this alternate universe, would paedophile priests like Ridsdale continue to prey on children, knowing a long jail sentence was coming their way? How would their boss, Bishop Mulkearns, have responded? The old cover up and move on strategy would have stopped there and then.

Of course we will never know but it is an entirely reasonable conclusion to draw that literally hundreds of victims would have been spared the enduring trauma of child sexual abuse had police done their basic duty.

Did this collaboration between Church and VicPol end in 1972? I believe it did not and there is evidence today of reports from victims not being acted on, statements from victims made to police going missing and watered down prosecutions, where priests like Ridsdale faced lesser charges while the more serious offences were not pursued.

Some of these instances may involve investigative ineptitude, some where police failed to act out of fear for the consequences on their own careers. It is worth noting those senior police involved in the Day scandal, whose perverted sense of loyalty to the Church, contrary to the oath they had all taken to protect and serve the people of Victoria, continued to rise through the ranks in VicPol. One retired as an Assistant Commissioner, one the head of Homicide, another the head of the CIB.

Apologies have been issued to Ryan by Victoria Police and its failures quietly acknowledged. But VicPol to date has failed to apologise to victims arising out of the Day conspiracy and I believe it has failed to do so because it strikes at its essence. No police force can act without public confidence and there can be no greater blow to public confidence than the historical failure of police to protect the state’s most vulnerable members.

Sadly, the state’s dirty secrets have been flung further into the shadows. What we can say is that without VicPol’s historical complicity with the Ballarat Diocese to suppress the investigation of clerical child sexual abuse, Ridsdale would not have become the monster he is today.

This column was published in The Australian 16 August 2017.