AUSTRALIA
Liverpool City Champion
April 15, 2020
By Peter Gogarty
On the day the High Court of Australia quashed the conviction of Cardinal George Pell for child sex abuse offences, the Pope asked for prayers for those who suffer unjust sentences because “someone had it in for them” and compared them to Jesus who “was judged ferociously even though he was innocent”.
While not referring directly to Pell, the Pope’s comments were either ill-advised and oblivious to the deep distress they would cause to hundreds of thousands of child abuse survivors across the world, or they were deliberately chosen to be inflammatory and offensive to those same survivors. Of course, the Vatican later confirmed that the safety of children and justice for child abuse victims remained its priority.
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