Despite knowing Gerald Ridsdale was a tense and anxious man, Cardinal George Pell maintains Australia's most notorious pedophile priest was a mystery man.
Cardinal Pell has spoken at length to Sky News about the 10 months he lived with Gerald Ridsdale at the Ballarat East presbytery, a place where Ridsdale molested an 11-year-old girl in the 1970s.
"I didn't warm to him but we never clashed," the cardinal said on Friday.
He said Ridsdale was undoubtedly a capable man and was not someone people complained about to him at the time, even though they might have about other priests.
Cardinal Pell also revealed that he later learned a psychiatrist treating Ridsdale in 1975 was contacted by police, who said they had held concerns about him but were pleased something was finally being done about him.
However, the psychiatrist had been compelled to explain that he hadn't been treating Ridsdale's sexual behaviours, rather his anxiety.
Cardinal Pell was questioned via video link from Rome this week by the abuse royal commission over Ridsdale and other pedophile priests in the Ballarat and Melbourne dioceses.
He said he regretted putting the church before victims in the past but he had never put himself before either.
The cardinal said he felt tremendous relief that everything was now said and done.
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