I Stand With Cardinal Pell

I honestly feel desperately sad for Cardinal George Pell as the 77-year-old will be held at maximum security prison until his March 13 sentencing on five convictions of sexually abusing minors, according to the Guardian.

The Jesuit America Magazine reported that Pope Francis has reversed his earlier position and opened an investigation into allegations against Pell. The decision was made by Pope Francis given Pell’s high standing, apparently.

As you probably know well by now, dear reader, I am not one to hold back when it comes to prelates who err or men who abuse anyone - I abhor it. I can't really see what could be worse; especially in a Catholic context. It is a crime against the innocence which Christ calls us to emulate (Mt 18:3). It is the most fundamental betrayal of trust (Lk 17:2). It is a destruction of all that is good replacing it with selfishness, predation, power, and everything dark. It destroys faith and it destroys lives. The reality of affection for the sake of unconditional love is of fundamental importance to human relationships. Abuse is a betrayal of that reality.

But if I honestly consider that this is a wrongful conviction, and I remain silent about, what does that say about me? I believe it makes me complicit in a great wrong.

It was clear that McCarrick had been surrounded with rumour and innuendo for decades. Not so George Pell.

Pell didn’t have to go and face the accusations made against him, the fact that he did is evidence that he was confident that his innocence would be proven. As George Weigel writes in First Things:

"Pell holds a Vatican diplomatic passport and citizenship of Vatican City State. Were he guilty, he could have stayed put in the extraterritorial safety of the Vatican enclave, untouchable by the Australian authorities. But because Cardinal Pell knows he is innocent, he was determined to go home to defend his honor—and, in a broader sense, to defend his decades of work rebuilding the Catholic Church in Australia, the living parts of which owe a great deal to his leadership and courage."

Very unfortunately I have first hand experience of child abuse. I have a deep understanding of how it works and what it does to a person. I have known quite a few people who turned out to be abusers, I knew something wasn’t right in every single case. I have met George Pell, and on a human level I have to say I found him to be one of the most normal, down to earth men I’ve ever met. He is blunt, to the point, affable, open and down to earth. He is a man of conviction, he is a man of faith.

To think that this brave, loyal son of the Church has, in his later years, been forced to suffer such a trial and now imprisonment, is heart breaking, considering his contribution on a national and international level.

Don’t get me wrong, if he did it, then he must face the consequences, both in a temporal and a supernatural sense, and the depth of that makes me quake. But if he didn’t, and all my instincts tell me this verdict is unsafe, then what a terrible miscarriage of justice this is.

And the basic facts make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Anyone with anything surpassing a fleeting understanding of Catholicism would tell you that the idea that a Cardinal could slip away from his entourage to rape two boys in the open sacristy of a Cathedral where he has just said Mass is an impossibility. The Australian media are not blind to this and, despite the extraordinary anger in Australian society, many articles have appeared written by journalists who have examined the evidence and are confused, such this one:

"The prosecution case was that Pell at his first or second solemn Sunday Mass as archbishop decided for some unknown reason to abandon the procession and his liturgical assistants and hasten from the Cathedral entrance to the sacristy unaccompanied by his Master of Ceremonies Monsignor Charles Portelli while the liturgical procession was still concluding. Portelli and the long time sacristan Max Potter described how the archbishop would be invariably accompanied after a solemn Mass with procession until one of them had assisted the archbishop to divest in the sacristy. There was ample evidence that the Archbishop was a stickler for liturgical form and that he developed strict protocols in his time as archbishop, stopping at the entrance to the Cathedral after Mass to greet parishioners usually for 10 to 20 minutes, before returning to the sacristy to disrobe in company with his Master of Ceremonies. The prosecution suggested that these procedures might not have been in place when Pell first became archbishop. The suggestion was that other liturgical arrangements might have been under consideration.
In his final address, Richter criticised inherent contradictions and improbabilities of many of the details of this narrative. I heard some of the publicly available evidence and have read most of the transcript. I found many of Richter's criticisms of the narrative very compelling. Anyone familiar with the conduct of a solemn Cathedral Mass with full choir would find it most unlikely that a bishop would, without grave reason, leave a recessional procession and retreat to the sacristy unaccompanied."

I ask you, given the clear and obvious problems with this account, can we state that this is a conviction beyond all reasonable doubt?

Continued 

https://marklambert.blogspot.com/2019/02/i-stand-with-cardinal-pell.html