Pell Smeared Again on Abc. to Hell with Evidence

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
February 25, 2017

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/pell-smeared-again-on-abc-to-hell-with-evidence/news-story/b010d685a6595df3545c64bc63a63772

John Lyons accuses Cardinal George Pell on the ABC's The Drum of transferring a "known pedophile" priest to another town, where he abused again, and says Pell covered up the reasons for the move.

In fact, the royal commission heard Pell knew nothing of the pedophilia and the transfer was engineered by his bishop. Yet no panelist defended Pell.

Here is yet another example of how the media is so determined to hang Pell that nothing, and certainly not the truth, can save him.

Lyon makes his claims five minutes from the end:

It is so sad and telling that not a single person on the panel, including the Disability Discrimination Commissioner, points out the truth about these allegations, although all seem to claim enough knowledge to offer opinions on the issue.

What is the point of holding a royal commission if the evidence it produces is heeded only when it confirms prejudices, but certainly not when it challenges them?

In fact, even the very hostile Gail Furness, counsel assisting the commission, could not long make the claims as baldly as did Lyons in her final submission, relying instead on improbable inferences as the case against Pell fell apart in her hands:

Furness’s second claim is that Pell, as one of the consultors to Ronald Mulkearns, Bishop of Ballarat, should have figured out his boss was protecting Gerald Ridsdale.

Pell, then preoccupied as director of the Aquinas campus and principal of the Institute of Catholic Education, insists Mulkearns hid from him the real reasons Ridsdale was moved from parish to parish.

Furness does not produce any proof that Pell lied, or point to a single case where he was told of Ridsdale raping children.

She instead infers he must have realised Ridsdale was a paedophile preying on children after learning that Ridsdale went to New Mexico in 1989 for treatment.

Pell says he thought that treatment was for homosexuality. Furness suggests, without saying why, he knew it was for paedophilia and should have made the connection.

But note how many people knew much more than Pell and did nothing — starting with the police who investigated Ridsdale for abusing even the sons of one officer, yet unaccountably dropped the case.

And:

...bishop Ronald Mulkearns, who ran the Ballarat diocese from 1971 to 1997, knew of Ridsdale’s offending but failed to act, responding in the old-school manner of burying the problem in the hope it would disappear.

At the time of Ridsdale’s offending, Pell was a relatively junior clergyman, but he was one of the consultors who met to ratify the movement of Ridsdale around the Ballarat diocese, although the only certainty about these transfers is that they were the work almost entirely of Mulkearns. This is the way the church worked.

That was Pell's argument, too.

As for Lyons' implication earlier in the show that Pell was improbably professing ignorance of what everyone in Ballarat knew, false again. The royal commission explored just this for days, if not weeks.

Lyons notes Pell was living not far where the notorious Gerard Ridsdale was abusing boys (in fact, they shared a presbytery for a while), but he fails to add that so did Left-wing journalist Paul Bongiorno, then a priest, who offers an explanation not a single journalist has questioned - or not in relation to their colleague:

I know Gerald Ridsdale. I lived in a presbytery with him in Warrnambool. I’ve had the victims approach me to appear for them in court cases. Let me tell you this Fran. I had no idea what he was up to.

And when people look at me quizzically, I say: “Well look, let me tell you this. There are married men and women now who sleep with their husbands and wives who don’t know that their husband or wife is having an affair.”

Let me tell you that Ridsdale never came into the presbytery in Warrnambool and said: “Guess how many boys I’ve raped today?” They hide it. It was certainly hidden from me. And when it came out, after I’d left the priesthood, I was shocked and I was ashamed.

As I summed up after sitting in the commission's Rome hearings for four days:

Importantly, I have questioned my own predisposition to give Pell the benefit of the doubt, and last week even wrote a piece damning his record after he made a shocking comment in the witness box - a comment I and most other journalists misinterpreted as meaning he'd had no interest in abused children.

I felt seduced by the media praise when I did this, and know I would have been hailed as a hero if I'd kept kicking him, rather than apologising after I rechecked the transcript and realised my mistake.

But in the end, I had to follow the evidence and make a judgement of the man I came to know pretty well. And it is this: George Pell is innocent.

Pell was not part of a cover-up of pedophile priests. He is not a "coward". He is not "scum"...

It is true that he was blind as a priest in Ballarat to tiny warning signs..

But how many more people were just as guilty, or far more? The evidence to the royal commission shows that even parents of those hundreds of victims did not believe their own children, or did not know they'd been abused or did not go to the police.

Even when the son of a policeman was molested by the worst pedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale, no charges were laid.

None of the policemen in three towns where Ridsdale molested children knew of the pedophilia or took action.

None of the drinkers of the Apollo Bay pub - who the royal commission said knew Ridsdale molested children - went to the police.

The Solicitor General of Victoria decline to prosecute another pedophile priest.

None of the parents of children who swam naked in a river with one priest insisted on his sacking.

Virtually no country journalists knew of the pedophile priests in their towns or reported it.

So why is it Pell, of all these people, who has been grilled for such marathon lengths of time - when he was neither a perpetrator nor a proven protector of pedophiles? You may be still convinced Pell did cover up and is now lying about it. But test yourself, to make sure you are not being unjust to an individual in your fury at his church.

It takes a brave person to defend an innocent man who the mob is eager to string up as a defender of a pedophiles, if not even a pedophile himself.

The mob-panderers will flatter themselves by thinking that if they err in hanging Pell, it's just from an excess of virtue that they destroyed an innocent man. After all, think of the poor children! And hear how their attacks on Pell are applauded! Such click-bait!

The cowards will meanwhile calculate the danger to their own reputations if they defend a man against whom nothing is proven, only to find one day Pell is guilty of something, after all. Safer to say nothing. And so even senior church figures stay mute.

Have you seen how many of those mob-panderers and cowards there are? How few people of courage? How few people who bother even to simply read the evidence before damning Pell as the most evil of men?