I Was with Pell and Know He's Innocent

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
June 16, 2017

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/priest-i-was-with-pell-and-know-hes-innocent/news-story/e21670da6fe6b1c195fa957d95506435

ABC reporter Louise Milligan has peddled an implausiby lurid claim: that Cardinal George Pell caught two choir boys drinking altar wine after Mass at St Patrick's Cathedral and made them give him oral sex.

Melbourne University Press has even published Milligan's book detailing this allegation, which police have spent more than a year investigating.

And now a priest who was always with Pell at Mass at this cathedral says it simply could not have happened.

But first: from the very start this allegation seemed almost literally unbelievable.

Pell, an ambitious man then in his late 50s, would suddenly do something so reckless and criminal - something he'd never been accused of before?

Pell would force two boys to do this, knowing how much higher the risk was of being reported and found guilty, given the boys could corroborate each other's story?

The boys would be so ashamed of sipping altar wine that they'd comply with demands for oral sex?

Pell would do this just when he was leading the first campaign by any Catholic leader here to clean out pedophiles in his church, and knowing the media was already out for his blood?

But then the allegation got even less likely.

One of the boys actually denied any such abuse happened, and has since died of a drug overdose. There is in fact just one accuser.

Then this: a man I trust was a senior chorister at St Patrick's at the time, and was usually the last to leave services. He tells me Pell inevitably stayed after the Mass at the door of the Cathedral to talk to and say goodbye to worshippers. In that time the boys of the choir would have left for home or sport. They didn't hang around.

This chorister also knows the identity of the accuser. He cannot give the allegations credence.

Police have finally been interviewing other choristers. I know of only one of them, but he, too, cannot believe the allegations.

Now The Australian has talked to the priest who accompanied Pell at Mass:

A priest who says he accompanied George Pell every time he was at St Patrick’s Cathedral has challenged one of the most salacious allegations against the former archbishop of Melbourne — that he abused two teenage choir boys in a backroom of the Cathedral — in an interview with Victoria Police.

The priest, who was on the then-Archbishop’s staff from September 1996 to January 2001 told police late last year it was “physically impossible for Archbishop Pell to have been alone with anyone in the Cathedral, before, during, or after the celebration of Sunday Mass or on any other occasion’’...

The priest, who has refused to become embroiled in a defence-by-media, answered police questions related to an alleged incident after a Sunday Mass at the Cathedral between July and December one year. Cathedral publications and photographs show the building was closed for restoration for most of that year until a Saturday night in November, when a Vigil Mass was held to celebrate Christ the King.

Milligan does not put a date on the alleged incident, but implies it occurred before the lead up to Easter the following year...

Those familiar with the allegation, and who understand the workings of a cathedral, believed from the outset the claim was preposterous — especially the suggestion that the then Archbishop found the boys helping themselves to altar wine in a backroom. The priest told The Australian he was questioned extensively by police about altar wine, that was locked in a vault, with valuable chalices. Only about a teaspoonful was ever left over after Masses...

The 11am Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Pell when he was in Melbourne, the priest told police. The Archbishop, who lived at Kew, a few kilometres from the Cathedral, would arrive about 15 minutes before mass. He would be met by the priest and they would head towards the Archbishop’s sacristy (a room for keeping vestments and dressing for Mass...). On their way into the Cathedral, the Archbishop and the priest would pass the Choir Rehearsal Room, in an adjoining building. At that stage, the priest said, about 50 choir members would be rehearsing in the choir room, which the Archbishop never entered...

“At no time before, during or after Mass was the Archbishop in direct contact with anyone except that I was present,’’ the priest told police in a statement. “I was always standing next to him and usually at an arm’s length away.’’

Mass would start at 11am and finish at about 12.10pm. The Archbishop would then stand at the front door of the Cathedral, greeting people who had attended.

By the time the Archbishop and the priest returned to the sacristy the congregation, servers and choir had usually left the premises.

Read more details here.

They conform with what another chorister has told me.

Gerard Henderson has also noted factual errors and suggestions of clear bias in Milligan's book, as has another reviewer.

Meanwhile, what hope of justice for Pell who has been treated as guilty from the start by a media that has presented rumors as evidence, allegations as fact and falsehoods as true? Several allegations already against Pell have proved clearly false. One false claim was made by a man the media refused to reveal was himself convicted for sex offences against children.

But all the usual proprieties have been junked when it comes to Pell. We even had Justice Peter McClellan, the head of the royal commission into child abuse that grilled Pell with such hostility, volunteer to speak at the state funeral of Peter Foster, one of Pell's most hostile critics. This, while the royal commission is still weighing the case against Pell in its report into the Ballarat diocese.

Shouldn't royal commissioners, like judges, be seen to be impartial?

The MC for the service was ABC host Jon Faine, who was not actually a personal friend of Foster and has been a loud critic of Pell and a promoter of Milligan's book. Isn't our biggest broadcaster also meant to be impartial?

Victoria Police, in turn, is led by a man who made damaging claims against the church, including allegations of a failure to refer abuse claims to police, that have proved untrue. Are the police impartial?

Against all this, what hope does Pell have?

If he proves to be as innocent as he claims, and that I suspect, this will have been the most disgusting and pitiless and savage witchhunt that I can recall in Victoria in my lifetime.

I suspect so many people and so many institutions have become so complicit in this that backing out now will seem too embarrassing for them to even contemplate.

And so the witch hunt continues.