AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
August 24, 2014
Peter FitzSimons
Columnist
Cardinal Pell gets the roadhouse blues
The breathtakingly arrogant venality and cruel callousness of Cardinal George Pell continues to stun me. Speaking via video link from Rome to the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse on Thursday he compared the responsibility of the Catholic Church for sexually abusing children to that of a “trucking company”. You see, if the company’s driver picked up a passenger and then sexually assaulted that person, then “I don’t think it appropriate for the … leadership of that company be held responsible”.
He said that. He really said that!
So, Cardinal Pell, what if the trucking company had a strict policy since its foundation that none of its drivers could have any sexual outlet whatsoever, for their entire adult lives? What if the trucking company had a long and sordid history, globally, not only of their drivers picking up children and abusing them, but also of moving their drivers from state to state so that after every complaint they could be shielded from prosecution, thus allowing them to continue their abuse? What then, Cardinal Pell? For your position to be consistent you have to advocate that if a trucking company continued to employ drivers that took children into their cabs and abused them, that company should not be held responsible.
Given Pell’s position on not even releasing the documentation held by the Vatican over these cases of abuse, he must also maintain it is OK for the head office of this international trucking company in, say, New York, to decline to help authorities investigating this abuse, by refusing to give those files to police. Simply staggering, from first to last. HOW DOES PELL SLEEP? And how does anyone defend this?
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