CANBERRA, Australia — The lawyer for an Australian inquiry into child sex abuse suggested Wednesday that one of Pope Francis’ top advisers was lying when he denied knowledge of criminal allegations swirling around two notorious pedophile priests decades ago.

Australian Cardinal George Pell insisted he was telling the truth, testifying to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that he had changed a culture of “crimes and cover-ups” within the Catholic Church.

Pell, the pope’s chief financial adviser, told the royal commission in three days of evidence this week he was deceived twice by church authorities about child abuse allegations against priests Gerald Ridsdale and Peter Searson.

Pell said as an assistant priest in the Australian city of Ballarat in the 1970s, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns had not told him Ridsdale was repeatedly moved within the diocese because of pedophilia allegations.

Pell also said as an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne in the early 1990s, the Catholic Education Office and Archbishop Frank Little had concealed from him accusations of pedophilia against Searson.

“It’s a mystery, but in both cases for some reason, they were covering up,” Pell told the inquiry.

Commission chairman Peter McClellan told Pell his evidence of a Catholic Education Office cover-up “makes no sense at all,” because the office reported complaints about priests to the archbishop and vicar general.

The lead counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness, told Pell the same evidence was “completely implausible.”

Pell’s evidence he was deceived by church authorities in both Ballarat and Melbourne was an “extraordinary position,” Furness said.

“Counsel, this was an extraordinary world. A world of crimes and cover-ups and people did not want the status quo to be disturbed,” Pell said.

“I not only disturbed the status quo, but when I became archbishop, I turned the situation right around so that the Melbourne Response procedures were light years ahead of all this obfuscation and prevarication and deception,” he added.

Pell suspected church authorities kept him in the dark “because they would have feared that I would not accept the status quo.”

“They realized very clearly I was not cut from the same cloth,” Pell said.

“They might not have been certain I would take decisive action, but they would have been fearful that I would and pretty certain that I would have asked all sorts of inconvenient questions if I’d been better briefed,” he said.

Furness put to Pell that he had known about allegations against Ridsdale and that he had been properly briefed by the Catholic Education Office about allegations against Searson. Pell denied both propositions.