AUSTRALIA
Eureka Street
Frank Brennan | 21 April 2014
I write to defend Cardinal Pell in the wake of Elizabeth Farrelly’s claim in the Fairfax press that Pell, when appearing before Justice McClellan at the Royal Commission, proposed a ‘priestly child abuse insurance scheme’ and that ‘if you wanted to maximize the damage already done to countless children, you’d be hard put to find a surer way or crueler’.
I am a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, but I have never been on Cardinal Pell’s Christmas Card list. It got to the stage a couple of years ago that he gratuitously published the observations that ‘part of the key to understanding Brennan is that he’s really not well educated in the Catholic tradition — in Catholic theology’ and that for the Jesuits, Jesus ‘has been almost displaced by (their) enthusiasm for social justice’.
He is not one of my fans, and neither am I one of his. But I think Farrelly has unfairly kicked him when he is down. More importantly she has muddied the waters about what is a critical issue for the victims of child sexual abuse suffered within institutions, including the Catholic Church.
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