Ridsdale a mystery man, says Pell

Australia's most notorious pedophile priest was a tense and unusual man but not someone Cardinal George Pell came to know well despite sharing a house with him.

"I didn't warm to him but we never clashed," Cardinal Pell told Sky News on Friday, speaking of the 10 months he lived with Gerald Ridsdale at the Ballarat East presbytery where Ridsdale molested an 11-year-old girl in the 1970s.

The country's now most-senior Catholic said Ridsdale in essence was "a mystery man".

Cardinal Pell 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.

"I once celebrated mass after him and I remember his vestments were there and they were sopping wet from some tension or something like that, and I remember noticing that at the time, and I thought him a very tense man," he said.

"But that's the only particular characteristic (of Ridsdale's) that I can remember."

Cardinal Pell also revealed during a lengthy interview with Sky 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, 74, who was questioned by the abuse royal commission over Ridsdale and other pedophile priests in the Ballarat and Melbourne dioceses this week, said he felt tremendous relief that everything was now said and done.

While acknowledging that his denials of a cover-up angered abuse victims who said he must have known, he said he regretted putting the church before victims in the past but he had never put himself before either.

He said the reason he sometimes came across as "wooden" and "armour-plated" was partly to do with how he'd been trained, partly to do with his personality and partly to do with "needing to survive".