Cardinal George Pell is to have one last chance to overturn what thousands of faithful Catholics in Australasia believe to have been a wrongful conviction for sex abuse.
Thanks be to God. And also to all the faithful Catholics who prayed, and the few who pursued his cause.
"There did remain a reasonable doubt as to the existence of any opportunity for the offending to have occurred (emphasis mine)", say the Cardinal's lawyers. They claimed the judges in Victoria's court of appeal were wrong to convict on the Cardinal's failure to prove innocence, instead of the prosecutors establishing proof that the sex abuse had occurred, as the law requires they must.
In the upcoming appeal, the cardinal's legal team will claim that those judges were wrong to decide that the jurors' belief in Pell's supposed victim's testimony was reasonable.
So NZ Marists can add the doubts of the High Court in Canberra to any 'doubts' it seems they themselves may have had, about the Cardinal's innocence.
More doubt emerges about Pell's abuse, reads the breathless headline a couple of days ago, in the latest from the Marist's organ in NZ, CathNews.
So were the Marists not convinced of Cardinal Pell's innocence? Did they really harbor doubts? Did they not read at least some of the 'evidence' against the Cardinal?
Do they not know that the Victorian police launched a 'Get Pell' exercise two years before any 'evidence'- from a thoroughly disreputable 'witness', a drug user - was 'discovered'?
Do the Marists not know about the vitriol reserved by Australian media for the Catholic Church in general and Cardinal Pell in particular?
Had they perhaps read with avidity Louise Milligan's awful book The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Pell, and believed her ? They certainly read it: in August this year CathNews published a teary-eyed story complete with glam photo on Milligan and her dedication to 'uncovering the truth with absolute care and forensic attention'. For example her inaccuracies theological and historical, ranging from St Kevin's uniforms to clerical titles.
Now 'two former employees of the Melbourne Cathedral School have come forward expressing doubts', says CathNews, through gritted teeth you might suppose, so grudging is the tone of the piece.
'Expressing doubts' is putting it mildly. Two women who were on duty at the cathedral most Sunday mornings "know for a fact" that Pell's crime "could not have happened". To say that it happened without anyone seeing or hearing "is ridiculous".
These former employees of the Cathedral, unlike the sole 'witness' at the trial, are highly credible - they are, respectively, a former school principal and deputy school principal.
"George (Pell)", they say, "is too smart to do something so stupid."
What's worrying about the Pell case is the apparent gullibility, not to mention the unfairness of believing one man's word against another's, of Catholic clergy and laity not just in Australia but in New Zealand.
Courage of parish to address the challenge with the George Pell situation was listed among Helpful Aspects of Parish Life in a hand-out at Bendigo Cathedral in July. I was struck by the lack of
respect in referring to a prince of the Church as 'George Pell', almost as if he'd been defrocked. Were they saying they needed moral support to defend the Cardinal and explain his wrongful conviction to non-Catholics? Somehow I doubt it.
Back here, at Sunday Mass Father assumed a hangdog expression and dismissed the whole subject instanter, as if it were too shameful to mention. It seemed like that incredible testimony (which had appeared almost word-for-word in Rolling Stone in 2011, in the description of an alleged assault against an American priest) had been swallowed by the Church hook, line and sinker.
I don't think I've read or heard a single appeal from anyone in the Church for prayers for 'Pell', now in solitary confinement but recently allowed out to weed the garden in a prison yard. Whatever happened to 'The Church Militant'? It seems we're now 'The Church Waving a Big White Flag'. Or 'The Church of Cowards'.
Was it gullibility, or were our liberal clergy and laity in the Church of Nice, like the Australian public, only too willing to believe fake evidence of sex abuse against a cardinal who is a ruthless financial manager, blunt, outspoken and orthodox? Or was it, more simply but more seriously, envy of a man with a superior intellect who, I suspect, did not suffer fools gladly?
Way back in 2003, at the episcopal consecrations of Fr Julian Porteous and Fr Anthony Fisher OP at St Mary's Cathedral Sydney, it was Archbishop George Pell who gave the homily.
Read these excerpts from his sermon and ask yourself, is it any wonder there were many clergy and hierarchy - and laity who are too easily gulled by their leaders - who were only too ready to accept Cardinal Pell's conviction?
Quoting Pope Gregory the Great:
"A person who is not in good standing with God can make the situation worse through his intercession.
"The bishop will be assailed by a lust for pleasing people; by a desire to put a cushion under every elbow."
Archbishop Pell went on to quote Cardinal Avery Dulles:
"The Magisterium would forfeit all credibility if it taught only what people wanted to hear. The first and indispensable task is to bear witness to the deposit of faith."
To return to Archbishop Pell's own words:
"Incompetent leaders can cause damage more easily than good leaders can encourage growth."
We can only hope and pray that those who appoint the next bishop of the Diocese of Palmerston North have similarly Gospel-founded ideas and ideals.
Oh, Julia, this is such a great post! Having read Cardinal Pell's articles in the Latin Mag. at times, I find it impossible to believe that a man of this stature could be guilty of such impossible crimes. Earlier in the questioning of him, his disgust at such matters was so evident that he was almost speechless....we probably all saw that on the news.
ReplyDeleteI never believed Cardinal Pell guilty. I read Justice Weinberg's summary (he was the one dissenting judge at the Appeal) and he seemed to conclude that the whole thing was utterly improbable if not impossible.
ReplyDeleteIf Pell is guilty no one is safe from any accuser.
It is also too much of a coincidence that the Victorian police started looking for victims, the 'Get Pell' fiasco, while Pell was sorting out the Vatican finances. So follow the money, perhaps he was framed.
Meanwhile, Pell rots in jail in solitary confinement pulling out weeds for $10 a time while serial predator McCarrick is treated like a star guest at the comfortable monastery that protects him, with good food, comfort and company. He was just a creepy little man with a talent for wringing money out of the rich. Where is the justice in that?
"Perhaps he was framed", indeed. Worse has happened at the Vatican in the last 50 years.
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