Rest In Peace Stephen
Title: The true legacy of the rapist George Pell
Author: Louise Milligan
Publisher: The Monthly
Date: September 2025
As the Catholic Church finds a new legal defence against child sexual abuse charges, disgust with the late cardinal George Pell’s glorification has now led some of his own victims to come forward and detail their abuse at his hand.
Our cover story for the February 2025 issue of The Monthly was an extraordinary and incendiary essay by award-winning journalist Louise Milligan, telling the story of some of the forgotten victims of the late Cardinal George Pell. In between our going to print with the issue and it going on sale, we were made aware of a parallel civil case that was going through the courts. As a consequence, and in the interests of protecting the legal process, we made the decision to remove all reference to the essay from our website, and copies of the magazine from Victorian newsstands. Now, following a settlement in that case, we are finally – proudly – in a position to again share Milligan’s journalism and the victims’ stories.
The day politicians, priests and pundits filed into St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney for the pontifical requiem mass venerating Cardinal George Pell as a Catholic hero, a soldier for truth, a prospective saint and an unfortunate scapegoat in a vast woke conspiracy, a mathematics teacher was at home, seething.
In David’s inbox was a letter from the National Redress Scheme that threw into serious doubt the platitudes of the faithful. It was dated December 7, 2022 – five weeks before Pell’s death.
The official letter from the government compensation scheme, set up after the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, said its decision-maker had found that in 1975, when David was eight, he was sexually abused by one George Pell at the YMCA swimming pool in Camp Street in the central Victorian goldfields town of Ballarat.
David’s fury led him to write his own reflections on the life of the late cardinal.
“What should George’s obituary be?” David wrote at the time. “I would like an acknowledgement that George was a habitual and gloating sex offender against children …
“George was charming to me. He often knew my name, and he certainly knew which family I belonged to. Sometimes he was too familiar – like in the Camp Street swimming pool …
“The debate needs balance! George’s victims still need a voice.”
Crucially, as Pell was being laid to rest in an elaborate pontifical mass on February 2, 2023, the Catholic Church, via its Ballarat diocese, had been notified of the decision to grant David compensation for his abuse by Pell.
It is not the only letter of this kind about the cardinal. In the worst example I am aware of, the scheme’s decision-makers found in August last year that a young boy, James, was anally raped by Pell in a gymnasium. That finding was made 19 months after Pell’s death. I met that boy, now a man, with his elderly mother several weeks ago in Ballarat. The effect of all of this on them both has been devastating.
The decision-maker in James’s case stated that part of the reason they accepted that Pell raped James in the gym of Ballarat’s St Francis Xavier Primary School was that there were two other complainants who also made accusations about Pell abusing them in similar circumstances.
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https://www.themonthly.com.au/february-2025/essays/true-legacy-rapist-george-pell