AUSTRALIA
Independent Australia
Michael Galvin 25 May 2015
Cardinal George Pell does not seem to know it yet, but last week his world changed. Once and for all.
LAST WEEK, in Ballarat, no fewer than 17 survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church told their stories. The horror and pain in each individual story was gut-wrenching, but the cumulative effect was far worse than that. What emerged was a dense and interconnected latticework of violence, and sexual crimes of young children on a large scale.
Always ready to defend himself, the pugnacious Pell issued an almost immediate statement. His statement was as predictable as it was irrelevant. What it showed was that Pell clearly does not realise this nightmare and his place in it has moved on to a new stage.
He still thinks it is about his personal actions and his personal innocence. What a proud, inflexible man he must be. And how blind he is — blind to the fact that this is not just about him, it is about an institutional failure so massive and so evil as to almost defy belief.
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