Tag Archives: Paul Collits

Books, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, Political correctness, Religion

The Persecution of George Pell – a Review

Paul Collits, The Freedoms Project, 12 December 2020

There was a pleasant surprise in the mail a few weeks back, when a new book arrived.  It was a book that I had not anticipated, though perhaps I should have.  It is The Persecution of George Pell, by Keith Windschuttle (Quadrant Books, 2020).

Windschuttle, the long-time editor of Quadrant magazine, has written the first pro-Pell book since the Cardinal’s exoneration by the High Court of Australia last April and his release from prison.  He had been held captive for over 400 days.  Against this, the three books about the Pell case already on the shelves remain festering there, all of them written by Pell-hating, leftist feminists, without apology or modification. 

One, indeed, was published after the High Court decision.  This was the book by The Guardian’s Melissa Davey.  Much of it would have been written prior to the High Court case, and no doubt the ending had to be altered, likely through gritted teeth.  Another was written by the (mostly) freelance journalist Lucie Morris Marr, the recipient in February 2016 of the leaked story that VicPol was investigating George Pell for sex abuse.  It is simply called Fallen.  Morris Marr still refers, rather tortuously and maliciously, to Pell as the “former convicted paedophile”.  She just doesn’t want to let go of either the swoon over the Cardinal’s conviction or of her own – at least in her own mind – critical role in the saga.  And the most infamous book of all was the ABC “journalist” Louise Milligan’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell, originally published in 2017, updated after his conviction yet notably unamended since April.  Milligan’s book has been described, perhaps unkindly, by an American observer as a collection of “semi-literate VicPol talking points”, and by another as simply a book-length character reference for the main Pell complainant. 

Two of the three books should, in conscience, be renamed to reflect the Cardinal’s now established innocence of the crimes for which he was unjustly convicted in 2018.

Massively superior to these Pell-loathing potboilers in its thoroughness, depth, breadth, style, rigour, intellectual heft, restraint, level of analysis and reporting of the truth, The Persecution of George Pell will restore much needed balance to the published output on the Pell case.  The likely emergence of other, similar book-length accounts of the case will only strengthen the sense of restored sense and perspective achieved by Windschuttle’s book, which addresses questions that are core to the case yet studiously, indeed malevolently, ignored by his competitors.  In fact, to compare Windschuttle’s book to the others would be to make a category error.

Read the rest here…

Catholic Church, Law, Media, Religion, The Left

Facing the rot in Vicpol (2)

This is the second part of an in-depth essay by Paul Collits on the stinking swamp of bigotry in which Daniel Andrews’ police force is mired.

Reforming VicPol in a Post Pell Environment – Part Two

Written by Paul Collits

Accepting that the Victorian institutions involved in getting Pell need reforming, this two part essay explores the uncanny parallels between the Pell case here and similar cases in the UK, and draws lessons from these in charting a course towards reform.

The Henriques Report on Operation Midland in the UK

The second UK case study which has an almost creepy resonance with the Pell case is the Carl Beech affair and the UK Met’s infamous Operation Midland (2014 to 2016).  To recap, a complainant known initially as “Nick” and subsequently revealed to be one Carl Beech alleged all sorts of horrendous crimes supposedly committed by a very high profile British political and other figures.  This was the paedophile ring’s paedophile ring.  He named names.  Big names.  And the Met simply “believed him”, trapped as it was in the moral panic associated with the sex abuse of children that followed the Jimmy Savile revelations and the various legal changes that had occurred in Britain, many driven by the Tony Blair Government.  Beech is now serving an 18 year prison sentence after his fabrications were revealed as such. 

A good summary of the relevance of the Beech case to Cardinal Pell can be found here, at Damian Thompson’s UK Spectator podcast, Holy Smoke.

Just as police trawling found its grim way from Britain to Victoria, so too did MeTooism and the treatment of all complainants as “victims”, flipping the presumption of innocence in the process.

Read the rest here

Catholic Church, Law, Media, The Left

More about the liar

In previous posts, I reported that some information about Cardinal Pell’s accuser had leaked into the public realm despite Victoria’s courts placing a blanket ban on any public information. He has psychological issues. He accused another Catholic priest of abuse. The latter evidently went nowhere because his drooling lovesick defender Louise with her description of chocolate drop eyes, or some other nauseating amorous declaration, has not mentioned it. Now Paul Collits in the previous post about Victoria Police wrote:

‘Witness J [the accuser], whose real name, broadly known among those close to the Pell case including this writer, cannot be stated in public, was clearly central to the Police case against Pell.  Without Witness J, the case goes nowhere.  Yet Witness J is highly problematic.  His story changed over time, in important ways.  His book length character reference from Louise Milligan has been discredited by claims of a less than exemplary life, and there is even the suggestion that he wished to withdraw his complaint after the first Pell trial.’ 

This and other information about the accuser is obviously doing the rounds just below the surface of media reporting. So, the leak into the public sphere will continue despite the court’s efforts to bludgeon people into silence.

Where we are at: psychological issues, false accusations, and a less than exemplary life. It is the intimated background of his accusations against Cardinal Pell.

Catholic Church, Law, Media, The Left

Victoria Police – Should we be afraid?

Paul Collits has again raised some deeply disturbing questions about Victoria Police’s role in the jailing of Cardinal George Pell, not the least of which is VicPol’s apparent campaign ‘to get Pell’. Collis’s ten questions must be answered to restore confidence in the state’s police force already rocked to it foundations by the frightening ‘Lawyer X Affair’.

Ten Sets of Questions for VicPol on the Pell Case

by Paul Collits, The Freedom Project website established and edited by Kathy Clubb

Whatever the outcome of the upcoming High Court appeal by Cardinal Pell against his conviction on sex abuse charges, and despite the continuing social media tirades against the man and the undying hatred expressed by Pell haters against his small band of public defenders, there has been a recent, ever-so-subtle turn in elite opinion towards the possibility of an Alfred Dreyfus/Lindy Chamberlain scenario here.  That the man may have been wrongly convicted.  This is evidenced by some support for Pell’s innocence from unlikely quarters, and suggests hope against hope for justice.  Andrew Bolt has commented on it.  Yet, despite these tentative signs of hope, and the pleasant surprise, against the odds, that the High Court even decided to hear an appeal, there is still a massive job of work to be done in order to restore the Cardinal’s reputation. 

There is also an astonishingly long list of unanswered questions about the Pell case, including questions about the highly unorthodox investigation undertaken by Victoria Police into his possible commission of acts of sex abuse against minors.

Indeed, one of the institutions clearly hoping for a final dismissal of Pell’s claims of a miscarriage of justice will be Victoria Police.  Whatever one thinks of the Court of Appeal majority judgement – and there has been an utter evisceration of that judgement by lawyers, scholars, Catholic and non-Catholic journalists, researchers and bloggers, not to mention by Mr Justice Weinberg in his powerful dissenting judgement – the organisation perhaps most invested in “getting Pell” is, without doubt, VicPol.

Read the rest HERE.