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A high-ranking Vatican official said Wednesday that he should have done more to stop the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church, acknowledging that he was told of at least one priest "misbehaving" with boys at an Australian school.
Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's treasurer, told a government commission in Australia that he did nothing when a boy at a Christian Brothers school in rural Victoria state mentioned the behavior "casually in conversation" in the mid-1970s.
Pell's four-day questioning over cases involving hundreds of children in Australia from the 1960s to the 1990s has spurred a discussion around accountability for church leaders, given his high rank within the church.
Pell told the inquiry that the church made "enormous mistakes" and "catastrophic" choices by refusing to believe abused children, shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish and over-relying on counseling of priests to solve the problem.
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