Cardinal O’malley Urged to Speak up on Abuse

By Peter Gelzinis
Boston Herald
June 30, 2017

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/peter_gelzinis/2017/06/gelzinis_cardinal_o_malley_urged_to_speak_up_on_abuse

Credit: Joseph Prezioso

Did cops in Australia take more decisive steps to address alleged sex abuse by the hand of a top Vatican prelate, Cardinal George Pell, than either Pope Francis, or Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley?

Anne Barrett Doyle of Milton, founder of Bishop­Accountability.org, believes they did.

“Accountablity is happening,” Doyle told me yesterday. “The problem is, it’s happening outside the church at the hands of civil authorities looking to solve a crime and secure some justice.

“This pope and our cardinal should be leading the way,” Doyle said.

Yesterday she urged both Pope Francis and Cardinal Sean O’Malley to seize this particular moment to weigh in forcefully on the humiliating scandal of a prince of the church facing sex abuse charges.

“I think Pope Francis and especially Cardinal Sean need to speak up, and speak out loudly about what has happened. They both need to address this issue head-on. And do it now.”

But for the collar and the crucifix, George Pell might well have been a senator or congressman proclaiming his innocence, instead of the cardinal archbishop of Australia, third-highest prelate in Rome and treasurer of the Vatican bank.

Cardinal Pell displayed a pol’s defiance yesterday at being forced to leave the Vatican and journey back to Sydney to face multiple charges of sexual abuse, allegedly committed when he was a priest in Melbourne.

He also had the requisite Vatican flack at his side to assure the press this 76-year-old cardinal was not going take cover behind great stone walls or velvet curtains.

“I repeat, I am innocent of these charges,” Pell said at a news conference in Rome. “They are false. The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me.”

Abhorrent perhaps, but the subject is hardly unfamiliar to Cardinal Pell. More than a year ago, an abuse survivor, Peter Saunders, quit his position on the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, formed in direct response to the church’s sex abuse crisis by our Cardinal O’Malley.

Saunders quit because he believed that Cardinal Pell’s continuing presence on the Papal Committee of Nine Cardinals — and what he described as his efforts to protect abusive priests when he was bishop in Melbourne, along with his “complete insensitivity” to abuse at the hands of clergy — belied the commission’s goal.

For all of their personal charisma, warmth and charm, Pope Francis and Cardinal O’Malley are confronting the stark reality that the prelate in charge of the Vatican bank — a man two heartbeats away from the pope — will be going back to Australia to fight the kind of charges that have managed to gnaw at the core of the church here in Boston and across the world.

Enlisting the support of abuse survivors to sit on commissions is well-intentioned, but when those very survivors start to believe that the effort to confront this scourge is half-baked, then what has been accomplished?

Maybe the Australian cops and courts will shine the light and point the way this time.