The Vatican’s Moral Failure Is the Core of This Child Sex Abuse Evil

By Patrick Carlyon
Sunday Herald Sun
March 4, 2016

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CARDINAL George Pell last week blamed Bishop Ronald Mulkearns for the paedophile priest scandals in Ballarat. Archbishop Frank Little was at fault in Melboune. Errant individuals in a system, went the argument.

Pell cast himself as a bystander. Passive, perhaps, but unwitting. He may have been blinded by ambition. Here, by his own reckoning, sat the most hopelessly incurious scholar in Oxford history. Legalistic. Cold.

Pell sounded at times like an ageing accountant being quizzed on tax reform. An observer coined a new word — “apellogy”. Those seeking evidence of the enduring blind spot in the Catholic patriarchy once again had their Exhibit A: the absence of understanding of the bond between parent and child.

After an hour last Monday, sex abuse victims started trailling out of the Verdi Room of Rome’s Hotel Quirinale, in search of a bathroom or a smoke. They had seen this show before. If the stakes had risen, so had their roles. They were barbarians buzzing at the papal gates, laden with messages that international news outlets, such as the BBC and the New York Times, itched to receive.