AUSTRALIA/ROME
Daily Mail
By BELINDA GRANT GEARY and LUCY THACKRAY FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA
Commentator Andrew Bolt – who previously referred to Cardinal George Pell as the ‘victim of a vicious witch hunt’ – appears to have changed his tune, slamming the church official for failing to protect vulnerable children who were abused at the hands of a notorious pedophile priest.
Mr Bolt, who was sent to Rome to cover the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, had previously called the coverage on Cardinal Pell ‘shameful, disgusting and frightening’.
But after the Cardinal described the prolific sexual abuse of children at a Victorian parish ‘a sad story’ that ‘wasn’t of much interest’ to him, Bolt proclaimed he had ‘stained his reputation forever’.
‘His fate was sealed. That quote will be hung around Pell’s neck forever. The priest who went by the book, not the heart,’ Bolt wrote in an article published in the Herald Sun on Wednesday.
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