Tag Archives: Cardinal George Pell

Australia, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, The Left

Award-winning article on Cardinal Pell’s persecution

Fr Frank Brennan was awarded the Australian Catholic Press Association’s 2022 prize for best feature writing for ‘Anatomy of a Travesty’. He wrote the following on his Facebook page, pointing out the reprisals for any Catholic of standing who dared to defend Cardinal Pell.

My 8-page feature on the acquittal of Cardinal George Pell, ‘Anatomy of a Travesty,’ has won the Australian Catholic Press Association’s 2022 prize for best feature writing. I am delighted that the piece was judged worthy of an award. It was always difficult for anyone in the Catholic Church to write publicly about this matter.

The Pell saga was an appalling police sting operation protracted by grossly erroneous judicial reasoning by Victoria’s two most senior judges. It took all seven of the High Court judges to put things right. Hopefully lessons have been learnt by the police and the Victorian DPP so that complainants and those accused of child sexual abuse can be better served by the criminal justice system.

The demonstrable failures of the Victorian criminal justice system did nothing to help the efforts being made to address the trauma of institutional child sexual abuse. As a society we need to do better, and the legal system needs to play its part.

I hope my writing has contributed to more just outcomes, sparing complainants and accused persons unnecessary added trauma and hurt.

The feature article is the last chapter in my book ‘Observations on the Pell Proceedings’ (Connor Court 2021) which is dedicated to ‘those who seek truth, justice and healing and to those who have been denied them’.

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Conservatism, Radicalism, Religion

The Cardinal we know and admire

Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, lynch-mob leaders like delusional Louise Milligan, and that whole band of feral wokists have not bowed Cardial George Pell in the least. Not even 404 days in solitary confinement made one jot of difference to his immovable stand on moral and religious principles. He wrote three inspiring books about his experiences. When a German cardinal and a German bishop proposed changing key dogma of the faith, the aging cardinal was immediately at the barricades.

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Cardinal Pell Calls on Vatican to Correct 2 Senior European Bishops for Rejecting Church’s Sexual Ethics

Jesuit Cardinal Hollerich of Luxembourg and Bishop Bätzing of Limburg have both called for changes to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality in recent interviews.

Edward Pentin Blogs NCR March 15, 2022

VATICAN CITY — Cardinal George Pell has called on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to publicly reprimand two of Europe’s most senior bishops for what he said was their “wholesale and explicit rejection” of the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics.

In a statement released March 15, Cardinal Pell asked the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation to “intervene and pronounce judgment” on comments made by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the relator general of the Vatican Synod on Synodality, and Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German Bishops’ Conference. 

Cardinal Pell had made the appeal a few days earlier, in an interview given to the German Catholic television agency K-TV on March 11.

Jesuit Cardinal Hollerich of Luxembourg and Bishop Bätzing of Limburg have both called for changes to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality in recent interviews. 

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, Religion

The Pell lynch mob – undeterred and unbowed

The main point that emerges from Ross Fitzgerald’s review of Gerard Henderson’s book, Cardinal Pell, the Media Pile-on and Collective Guilt, is that the cardinal’s antagonists remain immovable in their belief that he is guilty as charged. It does not matter what has been said, how detailed and coherent the analysis of the ‘choirboy’s’ absurd story, the 7-0 verdict of the High Court, and the international consternation at the failure of Australia’s legal system, they remain impervious. You only have to follow Louise Milligan’s twitter account to witness the mob’s delusion and unrestrained hatred of Cardinal Pell. Indeed, I have described Milligan as delusional, but I wonder. Is it delusion or is it pure malice? Is she mad or bad? Gerard Henderson’s highly recommended book provides evidence for one or the other – or perhaps both.

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Cardinal George Pell: a man of sorrows

Ross Fitzgerald, The Australian, 8 December 2021

The case of George Pell revealed deep fault lines in Australian society. Some people were convinced of his innocence, but many others wanted him to be guilty.

The trial, retrial, and conviction in December 2018 of Cardinal Pell for historical child sexual abuse of two choirboys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral that allegedly occurred in the mid-1990s, gained international attention.

Sensationally, in April 2020, all seven judges of the High Court of Australia quashed Pell’s conviction.

On April 7, 2020 at 10am, Chief Justice Susan Kiefel quoted from the unanimous judgment: “It is evident that there is a possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof.” That Tuesday morning, as a high-profile convicted pedophile, Cardinal Pell was in solitary confinement at the maximum security Barwon Prison, near Geelong. He had been incarcerated in various prisons for 405 days.

As Gerard Henderson documents in this scrupulously researched book, the High Court’s decision had huge reverberations. Even though the evidence against him was weak, most of Pell’s opponents, in Australia and overseas, retain their unambiguously entrenched positions.

Henderson argues, convincingly, that the Cardinal’s many antagonists continue to deny him the presumption of innocence.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Law, Media, Politics

Where did Becciu’s money go? The question remains

Cardinal Pell to Becciu: What was that $2M payment actually for?

By Christine Rousselle

Catholic News Agency, Dec 17, 2021

Cardinal George Pell says that he does not harbor any ill will toward the man whose sexual assault accusation sent the Australian prelate to prison for 13 months, but he still wants to know why the Vatican sent more than $2 million to Australia during his trial. 

Pell, the former archbishop of Sydney and the prefect emeritus of the Secretariat for the Economy, was released from prison on April 7, 2020, after the Australian High Court unanimously found that the jury which convicted him on Dec. 11, 2018 should not have found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. 

Pell was initially found guilty of sexually assaulting two choirboys in 1996, a claim he had always denied. He was freed 13 months into a six-year sentence. 

Since being freed, Pell has published his prison diaries in a series of volumes. His latest, “Prison Journal, Volume 3: The High Court Frees an Innocent Man,” was published by Ignatius Press on Nov. 2, 2021. 

Read the rest here …

Australia, Books, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, The Left

The tide has turned against Louise Milligan and David Marr

Gerard Henderson’s book on the George Pell pile-on exposes journalism’s mob mentality

CHRIS MITCHELL, The Australian, 29 November 2021

The release last Wednesday of a book about the media pursuit of Cardinal George Pell, and an earlier decision by The Washington Post to re-edit slabs of its own reporting about Donald Trump and Russia, highlight the need for journalists to reflect on how they are being used by their own sources.

The Post probably helped restore some lost credibility after special counsel John Durham on November 4 charged Igor Danchenko with lying to the FBI over the now notorious Christopher Steele dossier. The Steele material was used by the FBI, the Democrats and the media to build the Russian collusion case against Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.

This column had outed links between the dossier and the Democrats, but ABC’s Four Corners went on to run a three-part special on the subject in June 2018, grandly called The Story of the Century.

Four Corners has never corrected the record. Nor has it admitted one of its main sources, former Barack Obama security chief James Clapper, had already told a secret congressional hearing he had seen no credible evidence against Trump even before he told Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson the opposite.

Read the rest here …

Culture, Law, Media, Religion

More about the Choirboy

Information about Cardinal Pell’s accuser continues to trickle out – the perfidy of VicPol (Victoria Police), as well. It is a farce that no official investigation into VicPol’s actions in this legal abomination has taken place.

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The Commissioner and the Choirboy

Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant, 14 November 2021

The anonymous former choirboy, Witness J, who falsely accused Cardinal George Pell of sexually abusing him in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, after Mass on a Sunday morning in December 1996, has now made some revelations of his own that shed new light on the case. He has put his Curriculum Vitae up on the online employment networking site LinkedIn. At Pell’s trial in 2018, Judge Peter Kidd put a suppression order on publication of the complainant’s name but many in Victorian legal and media circles know his real identity and will find the CV contains an intriguing tale.

While much of the public debate among Pell supporters prior to his acquittal pointed to the strange determination of the Victoria Police’s hierarchy to pursue such an improbable case, the focus was on the two most recent commissioners, Graham Ashton and Shane Patton. Their efforts to persuade both the Victorian Parliament’s inquiry into child sexual abuse and the national news media that Pell was guilty of such a crime was anything but the pursuit of justice. It looked like a stitch-up from the start.

The choirboy’s CV reveals, quite inadvertently, that as well as having these two members of the police hierarchy on side, he enjoyed the support of a third one as well, someone who has so far avoided any place in the overall picture.

Read the rest here …

Australia, Catholicism, Law, Media, Political correctness

Anatomy of culpable police and legal incompetence

In the 3 September edition of the Catholic Weekly, Fr Frank Brennan provides a lucid summary of his book Observations of the Pell Proceedings. One should read this book and Keith Windschuttle’s even more penetrating The Persecution of George Pell, but this article is enough to demonstrate convincingly the abject police and legal failure that locked up an innocent man for 404 days.

One wonders how deep Marxist Daniel Andrews had his fingers in this legal abomination. Evidence is his fury at the news Tony Abbott visited an innocent man in prison and his angry public declaration after the High Court 7-nil decision that WE SEE YOU, WE HEAR YOU, WE BELIEVE YOU. With this, the premier of Victoria gave his finger to the centuries-old foundational legal principle that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. Daniel Andrews is totally unfit for any executive government office, let alone that of heading a state.

As for the claim, uttered by ABC giants such as Barrie Cassidy, that Cardinal Pell was freed on a legal technicality, that is absolute rubbish, grasped at by the bigoted who would say anything rather than face the truth. Fr Brennan’s article shows the High Court quashed the verdict on the blaring evidence that the absurd case against the cardinal could not be sustained.

The Catholic Weekly deserves praise and credit for publishing two articles about the Pell injustice.

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Fr Frank Brennan: Anatomy of a travesty

A case that should never have happened

It’s time to declare that George Pell is innocent of the preposterous charges he faced in the County Court of Victoria and to move on for the good of everyone, including bona fide complainants and victims of child sexual abuse in institutions.

Because of the suppression orders put in place by the County Court, you were unable to follow the trials of Cardinal George Pell day by day. That’s why I was asked to attend the proceedings. That’s why I have published a book, Observations on the Pell Proceedings – so you can make your own assessment of the evidence.

My book is dedicated ‘to those who seek truth, justice and healing and to those who have been denied them’. Having followed the Pell proceedings closely, I am convinced that the case did nothing to help bona fide complainants, victims, and their supporters.

I write in the introduction: “The failures of the Victoria police, prosecution authorities, and the two most senior Victorian judges in these proceedings did nothing to help the efforts being made to address the trauma of institutional child sexual abuse. As a society we need to do better, and the legal system needs to play its part.”

I am convinced that light and healing can be more readily sought and hoped for if appropriate steps are taken to correct the errors made in the Pell proceedings. The compounding errors resulted in the unanimous judgment of the High Court of Australia which placed the Victorian criminal justice system in a very poor light.

I was left in no doubt. Cardinal Pell was innocent of these charges. He should never have even been charged.

Read the rest here…

Australia, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media

Cdl Pell and the appalling failure of Victoria Police

Marilyn Rodrigues of the Catholic Weekly recently reviewed Fr Brennan’s book on the Pell Affair, Observations on the Pell Proceedings, and commented on a 40 minute interview with him. Ms Rodrigues focuses on the staggering failure of Victoria Police to do their job without fear or favour. Indeed, it is clear, as it is in other examinations of VICPOL’s prosecution of Cardinal Pell, that they were out to get him. Either that or they were guilty of an ineptitude worthy of the most primitive tinpot dictatorship. I go for the former. One wonders how those senior VICPOL officer are not too ashamed to hide their faces. The 40-minute interview with Fr Brennan comes at the end of the review.

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The sting operation that came apart

By Marilyn Rodrigues -August 27, 2021

Victoria’s policing and criminal justice systems erred so seriously in relation to Cardinal George Pell that it shows that not even victims of abuse or bona fide complainants, let alone an accused person like the cardinal, could rely on them, says Australian legal expert Fr Frank Brennan SJ.

The law professor and rector of Newman College at the University of Melbourne attended key parts of Cardinal Pell’s trials and appeals and had access to court transcripts.

He became convinced that the cardinal was innocent of the historical sexual abuse charges brought against him, and that he should never have had to face them.

Read the rest here…

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Religion

The uncompromising Cardinal Pell

Below is a LifeSiteNews report on a wide-ranging interview Cardinal George Pell gave to EWTN’s Colom Flynn. There are three important features of this report.

First, Cardinal Pell shows how strong and forthright he is in his defence of Catholic doctrine. People will not like what he says, he admits, but that does not bother him. His duty is to defend the Catholic Church against attacks from within and without. His manly strength and resolve is the reason he has so much support inside and outside the Church.

Second, his manly strength and resolve is the reason he has so many enemies. Those enemies led by hate-filled Louise Milligan and the billion-dollar government funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) got up a lynch mob to perpetrate perhaps the greatest failure ever of Australia’s legal system, so great is their hatred of him for his political and religious views. Those clerics in the Church who joined the Pell lynch mob should fill all decent people with disgust.

Third, perhaps not unconnected to the Pell lynching, is the state of the Catholic Church in Germany. It is precisely the doctrinally corrupted German Church that Cardinal Pell is so outspoken about. At the present measure, as the cardinal describes it, the Church in Germany is de facto protestantized. It prompts me to wonder what it is about the Germans.

Luther led a successful revolt in doctrine and establishment against the Catholic Church. Then we have the destructive philosophies of Marx, Heidegger, Nietsche and a dozen others, leading to the Frankfurt School whose thought is laying waste Western Civilization. Of course, we cannot forget the Germans started two world Wars. Is it to exaggerate to claim that two Germans (Marx and Hitler) led the conflagration of the 20th century?

Cardinal Pell: German bishops’ duty is to ‘uphold the teachings of the Church’

‘I think that there is a percentage of the German church which seems to be resolutely heading in the wrong direction.’

Michael Haynes, 30 April 2021

VATICAN CITY, April 30, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In a newly released interview, Australian Cardinal George Pell has issued a warning to dissident German clergy, describing their opposition to the perennial teaching of the Church as “ominous,” and stating that it is the “duty of the German bishops to uphold the teachings of Scripture” and the Church.

Cardinal Pell, now aged 79, sat down with EWTN’s Colm Flynn to discuss the second volume of his prison journal. The wide ranging interview, aired on April 27, covered Pell’s 405 days in prison after having been unjustly convicted of child sexual abuse, as well as issues in the Catholic Church today.

One of those prominent topics was the state of the Church in Germany, described by the former prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy as “ominous.”

Read the rest here…

Australia, Australian history, Conservatism, Culture, Law, Media, Radicalism

The Cardinal Pell affair has SHIFTED to Edmund Burke Society site

NOTICE

The pages about the Cardinal Pell Affair have been transferred to my Edmund Burke Society (Aust) website.

As a preeminent political and social issue, it belongs on the Burke website. 

All comments and records about this most shocking episode in Australian history will from now be on the Burke website. Indeed, the Pell Affair is of Burkean proportions. This screaming miscarriage of justice is an accurate measure of how corrupted Australia has become from its foundations.