Tag Archives: High Court of Australia

Fr Brennan comments on the Pell Affair

Lessons Learned from Pell’s Sad Saga of Suffering.

Father Frank Brennan SJ

The Australian, April 11, 2020


Two weeks before Cardinal ­George Pell faced the jury of 12 fellow citizens who convicted him of vile sexual assaults on two choirboys, Scott Morrison delivered the national apology to victims of child sexual assault. Morrison told parliament: “Not just as a father, but as a Prime Minister, I am angry too at the calculating destruction of lives and the abuse of trust, including those who have abused the shield of faith and religion to hide their crimes, a shield that is supposed to protect the innocent, not the guilty. They stand condemned … On behalf of the Australian people, this parliament and our government … I simply say I believe you, we believe you, your country believes you.”

In Pell’s case, the jury believed the complainant, Mr J, who said he recalled events from 22 years previously when he was a 13-year-old member of the St Patrick’s Cathedral choir. They were convinced beyond reasonable doubt that Pell committed these crimes in the priests’ sacristy after a Sunday 11am solemn mass. Now the High Court has unanimously decided that the jury got it wrong. The court has ruled that on the evidence presented at trial, no jury could properly be convinced beyond reasonable doubt that these assaults occurred. The highest court in the land has determined that Pell is not guilty of these charges. How can this be? What lessons are to be learnt for the wellbeing of victims and complainants? How can the Victorian criminal justice system be improved to ­assist complainants who come forward many years after experiencing dreadful trauma, while at the same time protecting those who are wrongly accused?

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Pell Accuser – contradicting male sexual biology

So (following from the previous post) we have Archbishop Pell struggling under the awkwardness and weight of garments at waist level, his pants and underpants at his knees, on the verge of sexual assault. In other words, he is in a state of arousal ready to go into action. This is despite the gargantuan effort to hold all his clothes in the right place and the thought that any number of people could without warning enter the sacristy and catch him in a criminal act.

Utter nonsense.

Being a married man with children, I don’t believe any man could maintain an erection in such circumstances. An erection is the sign of male arousal and arousal can be maintained only in conducive circumstances. Apart from the environmental circumstances, layers of clothes don’t cooperate in maintaining arousal. There’s a good reason why films show couples flinging their clothes everywhere in the process of getting down to action.

The whole proposition is utter nonsense.

Say, now, that the lumbering, 56-year-old, 6-foot-3 archbishop has achieved what a slim nimble 18-year-old would have trouble with. The superhuman effort is now to maintain arousal while staggering after two 13-year-olds with a load of clothes and pants to his knees.

Utter nonsense.

To proceed to yet more incomprehensible behaviour, we are to believe that the two 13-year-olds have not done what the normal boy of that age would do. Recoiling in horror and disgust they would have easily evaded the tied-up archbishop and run from the sacristy into the arms of the many adults in the vicinity.

The scenario is utter nonsense.

Now we come to the truly incomprehensible. Once again, sorry to be indelicate. An erect penis once in action is looking for a climax. It doesn’t have a mind of its own. So, we are to believe that the archbishop put his erect penis into the mouth of one boy (he couldn’t do it without an erection), then into the other, and then fondled the unresisting boy while he had both hands engaged in holding his clothes in place and massaging a still erect penis. You see the problem? You would have to be a very stupid man not to. I won’g go further into the tawdry detail, but a normal man would see that the accuser’s claims are a total fantasy.

It is all a bare-faced lie.

Madame defarge speaks – again

The Guardian Australia in its report of the Pell High Court appeal sounded out the ubiquitous Chrissie Foster for her reaction. It was the usual stuff from the pale Madame Defarge of the Pell case. There was no way she would let the opportunity pass. The Cardinal should be marched directly to the blade. All that justice stuff is injustice.

Chrissie Foster, whose daughters were abused by the pedophile priest Kevin O’Donnell and who detailed a lack of support from Pell when she reported the offending to the church, said she was “devastated” by the court’s decision.

“The more I think about it the more devastated I feel about it,” she said. “It’s so hard to get a conviction of this crime against children. This case got that conviction. Now it’s going out of Victoria to the high court to be rehashed over.

“George has had the best of everything, the best defence money can buy, the best county court judge, and three top minds in the appellate court judges who heard the first appeal. And it feels now it’s all back to square one. It really is upsetting. What do we have to do to have this conviction stick?”

The media reacts to High Court decision

Today the High Court of Australia announced it would hear Cardinal Pell’s application to appeal his conviction. This was a relief to those convinced of the Cardinal’s innocence and who had found the legal processes so far a total farce, threatening to perpetrate the greatest miscarriage of justice Australia has seen and make Australia’s judicial system seem the dickie thing of a tinpot dictatorship.

Those media members of the Pell lynch mob were off the mark within seconds (I checked). It was the usual thing about the ‘disgraced’ or ‘paedophile’ Cardinal with the repetition of the charges for which Cardinal Pell was convicted, but no mention that the conviction was on the uncorroborated evidence of the faceless complainant while 20 witnesses said the charges were impossible. Nor was it mentioned that legal people around the world at the very least wonder about the integrity of Australia’s legal system.

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