WASHINGTON (DC)
Catholic News Service
March 6, 2019
By Gunther Simmermacher
In late February, the church pledged to put the victims of abuse first, to listen to them with an open heart, to root out the culture of protecting priests accused of abuse. Now a number of lay Catholics are undercutting all these good and overdue intentions by challenging the guilty verdict of Australian Cardinal George Pell.
Let’s be clear about it: Nobody can claim to know conclusively whether Cardinal Pell is guilty of the charges put against him except for the two people alive who were in that room on the day in question.
The jurors in the trial believed there was no reasonable doubt about Cardinal Pell’s guilt. It would be absurd if they all were in on a conspiracy, as some have suggested. Maybe the jurors were mistaken; maybe they got it right. Maybe Cardinal Pell’s defense was inadequate, and the prosecution made its case well. We don’t really know; less so if we did not follow the trial every day in the courtroom, as the jurors did.
So the enthusiasm with which Pell’s defenders — who include both ideological warriors and reasonable people — protest the cardinal’s innocence is misplaced. It’s one thing to wonder about whether justice was truly done in this case, but another thing altogether to protest the cardinal’s innocence (in arguments usually drawing from the defence’s case, which evidently failed to persuade the jury).
But that’s not the biggest problem with defending Cardinal Pell. What should trouble us is that in the first instance of a cardinal being convicted of abuse, so many Catholics immediately jump to his defense. They instinctively believe the accused cleric, and not the victim. And this is exactly the mindset that helped create the scandal in the first place.
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