The Catholic Weekly 5 September 2021

catholicweekly.com.au 15 V ista 5, September, 2021 Where were all the other people who would be pass- ing along that corridor at that time, and especially, where were the people who would have been coming and going from the priests’ sacristy im- mediately after mass, ferrying things from the sanctuary, bringing in money for col- lection or counting, concele- brants changing out of their garb etc? J stated that he never re- visited the priests’ sacristy until the police took him on a walk through preparing for the case. If the journalist Louise Milligan were accurate in her reporting and if R’s mother was rightly recalling her own conversation with J, J also had another account at that time. Let me quote Milligan’s ac- count directly which purports to be a record of the conversa- tion between Milligan and the mother “sometime after the detectives took her statement” on 1 July 2015, which was af- ter J had provided his first statement to police on 18 June 2015 (but before he made his second statement on 31 July 2015) alleging that the offend- ing had occurred after mass: “(J) gently told her what he says happened with the Arch- bishop. “He told me that him- self and [my son] used to play in the back of the Church in the closed-off rooms,” she says. “In the cathedral?” I ask her. “In the cathedral, yep. And um, they got sprung by Arch- bishop Pell and he locked the door and he made them per- form oral sex.” (J) still remem- bered the incident so clearly. Being picked up afterwards by his parents. Staring out the car window on the way home.” In the second edition of her book Cardinal , Milligan changed the detail about a locked door to a blocked door, and omitted all refer- ence to J being picked up by his parents. The effect of these changes was to bring her ac- count more into line with the evidence J gave at trial. Milli- gan doesn’t explain whether the other boy’s mother just got these things wrong or whether Milligan got them wrong. But it doesn’t much matter. This second account of recurring ferreting in back rooms when no one else was aroundwas dropped altogeth- er, or more accurately never adopted by the prosecution. “In the second edition of her book Cardinal , Milligan changed the detail about a locked door to a blocked door and omitted all reference to J being picked up by his parents.” ABC journalist Louise Milligan leaves the Magistrates Court on 27 March 2018 after having been ordered to transcribe shorthand notes of conversations she had with Cardinal Pell’s alleged victims after his defence barrister said they were “unreadable.” PHOTO:AAP, LUISASCUI