NEW SOUTH WALES (AUSTRALIA)
Mercator.net
April 10, 2019
By Michael Cook
The resolution of the case of Cardinal George Pell, now in jail after his conviction for sexually abusing two 13-year-old choristers in 1996, must wait until an appeals court hands down its judgement.
But in the meantime, commentary is being published which raises further doubts about the controversial verdict.
In the latest Quadrant, its editor, historian Keith Windschuttle, describes, thanks to an alert subscriber to his magazine, an American case with intriguing parallels.
I don’t want to rehearse the details of the crimes of which Cardinal Pell is accused. They are too lurid and they are readily available elsewhere. Suffice it to say that it is alleged – and the jury obviously believed this story – that he found two choristers swigging altar wine in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral after Mass on a Sunday in December 1996. He was very angry and forced both of them to perform sex acts. Later on, he encountered one of them in a corridor in the Cathedral and abused him again. Two boys were involved, but one died of a drug overdose in 2014.
What Windschuttle stumbled upon is an article in the September 2011 issue of Rolling Stone magazine by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely. It described a very similar incident involving a priest in Philadelphia. Fr Charles Engelhardt allegedly caught a boy named “Billy Doe” swigging altar wine in his sacristy. He encouraged him to drink more and showed him pornographic magazines. A week later he performed sex acts on him. A few months later, another priest allegedly abused him.
As Windschuttle points out, that issue of Rolling Stone was readily available in Australia in 2011. In 2013, Victorian Police commenced a trawling operation to find people who were willing to testify that they had been abused by Cardinal Pell. In 2015, the complainant came forward with his story.
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