Cardinal George Pell

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

As a member of TTH’s crack team of foreign correspondents sprinkled strategically throughout the world, I thought I would report to you on what is currently playing out down under with the Catholic churchman whom the world’s press are fond, (I think probably rightly), of describing as “the third-highest ranking official in the Curia” and as “the Pope’s finance minister,” Cardinal George Pell, a native son of these parts.

You wrote a very prescient piece about his legal woes back on 20 July 2017.

[NOTE: This website does not recognize the heretical, modernist Vatican II Church as the Catholic Church. But in the eyes of the world (and many sincere Catholics), it is the Catholic Church, and thus allegations of crimes by its clergy are publicly imputed to the Catholic Church. The media coverage of sex abuse charges, when that coverage is slanted or false, and the prosecution of false allegations, constitute a war against the Catholic Church.]

His Eminence, apart from his Vatican post, is Archbishop of Sydney, Australia’s largest city, and was before that Archbishop of its second city, Melbourne. He has been for several decades now far and away the most widely-recognized Catholic in this country. Although you and I and just about all other readers of TTH would beg to differ, he has long been identified by the press as a leading “conservative” voice in the church world-wide.

His Eminence has been on extended leave of absence from his Vatican post since June 2017 when he  was charged that month with a series of “historic” child sexual abuse crimes dating back to the 70’s and ‘90’s.

In your piece in 2017 you expressed serious doubts as to the credibilty of two of the main witneses against Pell, (the identities of most other witnesses, along with their detailed evidence, being withheld from the public by court order as is usual here in such cases).

You were right to do so. His Eminence’s Committal Hearing completed last month. The magistrate delivered her findings and judgement earlier this month. I’m not American but from what I have read of US practice and procedure our Committal procedure seems to resemble fairly closely the US “Grand Jury” procedure. That is: before someone may be tried for an indictable offense a magistrate, sitting alone, hears evidence in a modified type of trial in order to determine whether there exists a  reasonable possibility that a jury, properly instructed, might find the allegations proven. It is not  the criminal standard of proof of “beyond reasonable doubt” that is the test applied in committals but simply whether there appears to exist a credible or reasonable case for the accused to answer.

Cardinal Pell faced numerous allegations brought by these two highly unsavoury men, (and others). “About half” of the total of charges were struck out by the magistrate but he has been committed for trial on the balance, the main features of which seem to be inappropriate dealings at or in or about a public pool in the 70’s and at least one allegation, (perhaps more), as the press breathlesly note, of dealings with at least one chorister or altar boy alleged to have occurred inside Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in the 90’s, (His Eminence having been appointed Archbishop there in 1996).

Personally, I wasn’t too upset at the unprepossessing character of the two informants you dealt with since I learned long ago the truth of the adage: “crimes conceived in hell don’t have angels as witnesses.” I’m sure that your late, learned father would have agreed with me. The legal profession has a way of showing us that even damaged people do sometimes tell the truth. Not often, to be sure: but sometimes.

You were right, though. The magistrate found the evidence of at least one those witnesses to be so riddled with “inconsistencies” as to render him an “unsatisfactory witness” upon whom a jury could not safely rely. There was also a finding by the magistrate that the same, or another one of those accusers, displayed “a cavalier attitude to the truth”. Not surprising given their bios.

This, as our commercial media are always sure to mention, is not the first time Cardinal Pell has faced up to witnesses who have accused him of sexual misconduct. Here is a good account including a run-down of past allegations of crimes going back to the 60’s when he could prove he was not present in the country or else was not living where he was said by his accuser to have made his home at the time. Not surprisingly, the commercial media tends not to report on how very baseless the accusations proved when tested, with only the Catholic press being able to be relied upon to do so.

Noone disputes that even a senior Catholic churchman should be tried on even “historic” claims of sex abuse – particularly since the alleged victims were very young at the time it is alleged to have occurred– and if found guilty after a fair trial, punished. The problem is the unconcealed glee with which the press reports these allegations, the blatant lack of balance they bring to their reporting and the poisonous, biased impressions their reporting  tone helps to foster.

Look at this hipster’s weighing in, squawking a song calling his country’s highest ranking catholic cardinal a “pompous buffoon”, “scum” and “coward” – all to widespread public acclaim. This song was actually nominated  for Song of the Year.  Disgraceful, no?

What the commercial media doesn’t say is that this song was performed in February 2016 – well over a year before Cardinal Pell was charged with anything at all – and was levelled at His Eminence for acceeding to his Roman cardiac surgeon’s refusal to certify him fit for travel to Australia for purposes of giving evidence as a catholic churchman into the Australian government’s “Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse” which ran from 2013 to Dec 2017. His Eminence did not seek to avoid giving evidence at all – what was in dispute was only whether he should return or give evidence by videolink from Rome.

Same anti-Catholic animus with this other smug hipster on Australia’s publicly-funded ABC tv commenting on Pell.

The presumption of innocence in this case is ridiculed by the hipster host and laughed at by the audience. This hipster, too, makes fun of the Cardinal staying in Rome to give evidence on medical grounds without any credit given that Pell sought not to escape giving evidence  but just to be able to do so from Rome.

And since the Royal Commission concluded? What has loomed as the largest talking point in the commercial media is criticism of the Catholic church. One must  search very hard to learn of adverse publicity or public discussions relevant to the many other institutions and churches that came in for criticism on the same grounds. The main subject of reporting seems to be that of the 57 institutional case studies upon which public hearings were held by the Royal Commission one-third concerned catholic agencies while Anglicans were the subject of only 12 % and les so for the other denominations. And the fact that the  catholic church was by far the largest provider of schooling, sporting and social services to youth during the period covered by the Commission and that, pro-rata, the Catholic church in Australia was found to have committed fewer offenses than many of the other denominations? That we don’t hear reported so much. Who’d have thought!

And since he was charged?

We get the Melbourne Age  newspaper pronouncing the proceedings to be: “the inevitable last act in the drama of a man  who authored his own tragedy”.

Fair and balanced? I think not.  He’d be far better off in terms of press coverage were he a Muslim Imam, don’t you think?

Here was the average daily scene that confronted His Eminence arriving at Court – and this was only the committal. The real thing has not yet even started.

One needn’t be a lawyer to appreciate the dynamic that is in play here. There is nothing so common as those who point the finger for no just cause. It is commonly done, it seems to me, because it is so easily done. It takes no work or sacrifice to point the finger. Indeed, in the west today where manufactured victim-hood confers status and rewards, there is a positive incentive to do so and to cry “j’accuse”!

In my experience some people accuse others of awful things because they have been genuinely afflicted – but just as many or more point the finger because they are jealous competitors and covet their target’s job, or corner office or their spouse. Others do it because they have misinterpreted some innocent comment or action and bear a grudge. Others, Iago-like, do it purely out of spite, because they can.

Why Cardinal Pell? His scalp represents a huge trophy for those who pursue what is the last respectable form of bigotry in the west: anti-catholicism.

Why anti-Catholicism?  C.S. Lewis in The Screw Tape Letters nails it. He tells us not to define the Church by the way it manifests to the eye. He reminds us that the truth and power of the church is not really “the half-finished, sham-gothic erection on the new building estate” or “that selection of… (a man’s)… neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided”. The elites don’t fear those manifestations but they do perhaps sense the church as she really is and if they do they are right to fear her power: “the church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity terrible as an army with banners.”

I don’t know whether Cardinal Pell did all or any of what he is alleged to have done. Unfortunately for His Eminence and any Catholic churchmen who may come after him my favorite line of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird applies:

“In the secret courts of mens’ hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the moment Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.”

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