AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
EDITORIAL
HERALD SUN AUGUST 22, 2014
THE ill-chosen words of Cardinal George Pell in defending the Catholic Church on its legal responsibilities to the many people abused by its priests will only add to their pain.
In an extraordinary statement while giving evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Cardinal Pell compared the church’s position with no more than that of a trucking company whose drivers molested hitchhikers.
The comparison brought an instant rebuke from the commission’s chairman as well as a barrister representing a victim of abuse.
That Cardinal Pell could contemplate such a comparison is baffling. Surely he regards priests — and he is one, as well as holding high office — as the essential core of the church and indivisible from it as an organisation. Barrister Sean Cash’s response was that far from being a trucking company, the Catholic Church was an organisation of the “highest integrity”.
Cardinal Pell found fault with that. The church was not always of the highest integrity, he responded, and had “a long history of sin and criminality within the church”.
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