AUSTRALIA
The Age
[with video]
March 8, 2016
Peter Craven
Last week we saw Cardinal George Pell cross-examined for about 20 hours at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, with the 74-year-old prelate speaking via video link from Rome. Afterwards there was a meeting with victims who were pleased to hear he would try to set up a centre for survivors of abuse.
In an hour-long interview on Sky with Andrew Bolt, Pell said he wasn’t so stiff on the inside and, at one point, he appeared to weep. Yet none of this cut the mustard: from much of the response to Pell’s testimony, both during and after it, you would imagine he is personally responsible for the sins of the Church.
Why? Because we were witnessing a show trial. A week before the hearing began, the Herald Sun published a leak from Victoria Police that investigations were under way into possible crimes of the cardinal. No new lines of inquiry were offered, no reliable source was indicated and the one specific matter referred to allegations which had been laid to rest in 2002 when they were examined by Justice Southwell.
Still, the day after Pell made his notorious slip about not being “interested” in the sexual abuse, the front page of the Herald Sun said “Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Stop No Evil”.
It’s nonsense. When Pell initiated the Melbourne Response in 1996 he went further than any bishop had gone to fixing the problem. Yet a lot of people want to blame him for the horrors that were perpetrated for no better reason than they see his formidable, take-no-prisoners manner as the embodiment of the attitude of an arrogant and heartless church.
So, when he says that as a young priest in Ballarat he heard of a brother not only using excessive discipline but behaving dodgily with boys and he spoke with the chaplain who said the Christian Brothers were attending to the problem, this is met with derision.
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