‘Una Bomba’ Francesca Chaouqui points finger at Cardinal George Pell

ROME
Sydney Morning Herald

March 5, 2016

Nick Miller
Europe Correspondent

“Did you meet with the Pope today? What did the Pope say?” asked a TV journalist, as Cardinal George Pell brushed past him with a little wave to the cameras, stepping into Rome’s Hotel Quirinale.

“I’ve got the full backing of the Pope,” Pell replied.

It was an odd reply: not quite an answer to the question posed. Of all the things the Pope may have said about an inquiry into historical abuse by Catholic priests in Australia, or the finances of the Vatican, this comment came first to the cardinal’s mind.

It spoke volumes.

And it was the first sign that on this, the second of four gruelling night-owl sessions of examination over video by Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Pell would be playing some bad defence. …

Following Pell’s at times excruciating testimony, along with millions of other Catholics, was a young woman in Rome, Francesca Chaouqui.

Chaouqui, a controversial Vatican insider, had worked closely with Pell on reforming the Vatican’s opaque finances and she was appalled at what she was now seeing.

The only time the cardinal seemed comfortable was when the counsel assisting the commissioner was drawn into a philosophical discussion on the nature of group responsibility.

His prickly, hair-splitting, eyes-front demeanour relaxed, and there was a hint of the younger George Pell – an ambitious, whip-smart, academically minded and athletically talented Ballarat priest being groomed for the highest levels of Catholic power – while around him, to his claimed complete incomprehension, young boys were being groomed for abuse by a succession of evil clerics.

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