Get Religion blog
March 8, 2019
By Julia Duin
Ever since Australia’s Cardinal George Pell was convicted of child abuse, the journalism folks Down Under have been split on if he’s actually guilty or whether he’s the target of a vicious anti-Catholic campaign.
Reaction to his conviction and jailing (the sentencing isn’t until March 13), has rippled across the Pacific, prompting Ethics and Public Policy scholar George Weigel (writing at First Things) to call the Pell affair “our Dreyfus case.”
(Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jew and a military man who was wrongly pilloried and imprisoned in 1894 on charges of selling secrets to the Germans. He was declared innocent in 1906, but the matter was considered as barbaric anti-Semitism on the part of the French. The conflict tore at the heart of French society.)
I’ll get back to Weigel in a moment but first I want to quote from a piece BBC recently ran on all this.
Cardinal George Pell is awaiting sentencing for sexually abusing two boys in 1996. The verdict, which he is appealing against, has stunned and divided Australia in the past week.
It has sparked strong reactions from the cardinal’s most prominent supporters, some of whom have cast doubt on his conviction in a wider attack on Australia’s legal system.
The largely conservative backlash features some of Australia’s most prominent media figures, a university vice-chancellor and a leading Jesuit academic, among others.
Former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott also continue to maintain their public support for the ex-Vatican treasurer.
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