AUSTRALIA
The Age
March 5, 2016
Barney Zwartz
The pressure is now on Pope Francis to do more to rid the Catholic church of the stain of child sex abuse.
The penitential prayer with which Catholics begin their Mass, and which Cardinal George Pell would have recited thousands of times, asks God’s forgiveness for what they have done and for what they have failed to do.
Few people could have failed to do what they should have done more devastatingly than the cardinal. That is perhaps the most shocking, and damaging, revelation of his four days of testimony to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, given by video link from Rome this week.
The royal commission revealed to the wider world the man many Catholics already knew: an ambitious, determined and politically astute cleric with many strengths, a champion of the institutional church – but one who made sure never to know too much.
Time and time again he said it wasn’t his job, it was someone else’s, or he might have done something but no explicit request was made so he did nothing.
Watching Pell give evidence, I wondered whether he was handicapped by his unfortunate demeanour: his slow, heavy delivery and unemotional expression can seem pompous, overbearing and unfeeling.
But the longer it went on, the more watchers would have been convinced this was the real Pell being slowly revealed. It wasn’t just the style, it was the content: a pattern of denial, evasion, defensiveness, then blaming others – especially the dead and the demented.
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