Cardinal Pell a "Despicable Spin Doctor for an Earthly Hierarchy"
By Derryn Hinch
I was off-air yesterday obviously, attending the funeral of dear friend and AW colleague Paul Barber. And I expressed some of my thoughts on the AW website. It was a lovely funeral. As my grandma would say: ‘They done him proud’. It was a Catholic service at the Immaculate Conception church in Hawthorn. Before the service I had a private chat with the celebrant, Father Kevin Dillon of Geelong. A fine man of the cloth. He has appeared several times on this program as long ago as when Pope John Paul II visited Melbourne. Father Dillon is actually a listener and he applauded my on the marathon campaign I have waged against child abusers. Especially in his church. And it got me thinking. How hard it must be right now… how hard it must have been for years.. for decent, honourable clergymen having to (by association) wear the revulsion and opprobrium we have for paedophile priests. How all the good they do and the comfort they give can be besmirched by these evil men. And it dawned on my last night why Cardinal Pell’s press conference this week – after the announcement by the PM of a royal commission into sexual abuse of children and the cover-ups – it dawned on me why his performance almost made my flesh crawl. Made me want to shout at the TV screen as he tried to blame the media. As he talked about separately the fact from the fiction. As he cruelly insulted victims – and sullied the memories of those young men who committed suicide -- when he talked about ‘ exaggerations’. I watched not a man of Christ, not a disciple, not a spokesman for his Lord and Master but a despicable spin doctor for an earthly hierarchy. And it dawned on me what sort of speech George Pell should have made as a defender of the faith. He should have said something like, presuming he believes this: ‘I welcome this Royal Commission with open arms. My only regret is I did not lobby for it ten, twenty years ago. How much suffering of little children could we have prevented. ‘I despise men, who hide behind a collar, who pretend to be protectors of the young, who use my church, the name of my God, to rape children in the name of our Jesus Christ. They are not fit to call themselves priests. They foul the very sanctity of our churches by their mere presence in them. They pollute the vestry and commit sacrilege every time they lift a chalice to the lips during Communion. May they rot in Hell. And I pledge today, to the hundreds of thousands of decent Catholics who are forced to share this shame, that I will not cease in my quest to rid my church of these evil men until I am called for my own day of judgement …. So help me God.’ Didn’t say it. Wouldn’t say it. These rock spiders have acted with such impunity and immunity for decades -- under church protection – that if they were cockroaches, and they are lower than that, if they were cockroaches, they wouldn’t even scurry from the light. And church leaders who could have and should have trod on them years ago could have stopped them. They didn’t even call in the fumigators.
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