By Philip Pullella
ROME, March 4 (Reuters) - Australian victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests said on Friday they were disappointed they could not talk to Pope Francis and contested the Vatican's assertion that they did not go through the proper channels for a meeting.
The group of about 15 were in Rome for a week to watch Cardinal George Pell give evidence via video link to an Australian government commission about sexual abuse in Australia when he was a priest and bishop there in the 1970s and 1980s. He is now the Vatican's treasurer.
"We would have wanted to talk to him (the pope) about our story," said David Ridsdale, who as a boy was abused by his uncle, a priest at the time.
"We would have wanted to know how the pope could have assisted us by vocalising his support and acknowledging the mistakes of the past."
On Monday the victims announced they had sent a fax asking for a meeting to the pontifical household, the office that organises the pope's schedule, to a number they said was provided by Pell's office.
A Vatican spokesman said on Friday no request had been made though the proper channels.
"We made every effort to go through every channel we possibly could, both public and through the normal channels," Ridsdale said. He and another victim showed reporters a copy of a fax they said was sent to the Vatican and an email exchange with Pell's office about the possibility of a meeting.
"Considering what's been happening, I don't believe there was a lack of awareness of our efforts," Ridsdale told Reuters at a Rome hotel before the group left for the airport.
Pell testified from Rome to the government commission sitting in Australia because he said he could not travel home for health reasons. A crowd funding campaign in Australia raised the money for the group to travel to Rome to be in the same room with him.
Throughout the hearings, his failure to remember the details of many individual cases angered both the abuse victims who travelled to Rome and those who attended in Australia.
Pell told the inquiry that the Church had made "enormous mistakes" and "catastrophic" choices by refusing to believe abused children, shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish and over-relying on counselling of priests to solve the problem. said he was deceived and lied to by superiors as a young priest in the 1970s.
Given Pell's high rank at the Vatican, the questioning over cases involving hundreds of children in Australia from the 1960s to the 1990s took on wider implications about the accountability of Church leaders.