Pell Blames Media 'Smear'
By Barney Zwartz
[with video] A DEFIANT Cardinal George Pell has blamed a smear campaign against the Catholic Church for public pressure that led to a royal commission into child sex abuse.
The Archbishop of Sydney said a commission into the Catholic Church was not needed, but he welcomed the broader inquiry announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Monday night as ''an opportunity to clear the air, to separate fact from fiction''. He attacked a ''persistent press campaign'' and ''general smears that we are covering up and moving people around'', and suggested that abuse by Catholic priests had been singled out and exaggerated. He also suggested that cynicism about the church's handling of abuse was confined to the press, and the public understood that the church was serious about tackling the problem. Advertisement ''We are not interested in denying the extent of misdoing in the Catholic Church. We object to it being exaggerated. We object to being described as the only cab on the rank,'' Cardinal Pell told a press conference in Sydney. ''We've been unable to convince public opinion for basically the last 20 years that, whatever our imperfections in individual cases, we've been serious about this … Because there is a persistent press campaign focused largely on us, that does not mean we are largely the principal culprits.'' At the weekend, Cardinal Pell - defying statistics presented to the Victorian state inquiry into how the churches handled child abuse that Catholic clergy committed six times as much abuse as the rest of the churches combined - insisted the church was no worse than any other. He said it had been unfairly vilified because of anti-Catholic prejudice. On Tuesday he again defended church practices and said the royal commission - whose terms of reference and head have yet to be announced - would judge whether the claims were true or a ''significant exaggeration''. ''We acknowledge, with shame, the extent of the problem, and I want to assure you that we have been serious in attempting to eradicate it,'' he said. Cardinal Pell, who launched the Melbourne Response abuse protocol used only in that archdiocese when he was archbishop in 1996, described how then premier Jeff Kennett had called him to his office and said ''clean it up!'' Retired bishop Geoffrey Robinson, the principal architect of the Towards Healing protocol used in every other diocese, had some sympathy for Cardinal Pell's position, saying he would rather have a royal commission conducted by a judge than the media, as was happening now. But Bishop Robinson, 75 - who was abused as a child and headed the Australian church's efforts to tackle clerical sexual abuse for a decade, until he retired in 2004 because he was so disillusioned - had a different tack on the solution. He said the abuse crisis was doing massive damage to the church but the changes needed were in Rome. ''Until things improve by 10,000 per cent over there, everything done here will be second best. But I'd prefer all the dirt to come out now rather than dribble out over the next 20 years,'' he said. Cardinal Pell suggested media coverage of abuse, which rehashed the same stories, might open old wounds among abuse victims. ''I wonder to what extent the victims are helped by this ongoing furore in the press,'' he said. Asked whether priests who were told about abuse in the confessional should report it, he said: ''The seal of confession is inviolable.'' But if the priest suspected that he would be told of such events, he should refuse to hear the confession. ''That would be my advice, and I would never hear the confession of a priest who is suspected of such a thing.'' Mr Kennett said he remembered meeting Cardinal Pell as the new archbishop of Melbourne. ''I said, 'You are new to the job, your challenge is to clean up these allegations as quickly and best you can for the sake of the victims and in defence of the very good work the church does.''' Asked if he had told the archbishop that ''if you don't fix it I will'', he said he could not remember but it sounded like his language. ''I charged him, though I had no authority to do so, to clean it up.'' Mr Kennett said the abuse crisis ''broke the spirit'' of Cardinal Pell's predecessor in Melbourne, Archbishop Frank Little. ''I don't think he could bring himself to believe that in his flock people had committed these deeds.'' Mr Kennett said the royal commission would take years and might cost hundreds of millions of dollars, ''but so be it. It has to be done.'' He suggested witnesses might need financial help.
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