UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Sarah Kaplan June 3
Cardinal George Pell left Sydney two years ago to great fanfare. The longtime Archbishop of Sydney and lauded “defender of the faith down under” had just been appointed chief of the Vatican’s finances — sometimes described as the second most powerful position in Rome. It is the highest an Australian has ever ascended in the Church.
But Pell couldn’t leave behind the child sex abuse scandal that had rocked his hometown, or the hushed accusations that he had a part in it. Those accusations have grown louder and much more public since last month, when an Australian commission began hearings into a notorious pedophilia ring just down the road from where Pell once served as parish priest.
Amid fervent coverage in the Australian press, an accusation that his handling of the issue was “sociopathic” and testimony that Pell ignored warnings about his abusive colleagues and attempted to bribe one victim to stop him from speaking out, Pell has now hired lawyers to fight off attacks from the decades-old scandal he can’t quite shake.
The issue came to a head this Sunday, when Peter Saunders, a British survivor of sexual abuse by a priest who had been specially appointed by Pope Francis to serve on the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors, said that Pell should be removed from his position.
“He has a catalog of denigrating people, of acting with callousness, cold-heartedness, almost sociopathic, I would go as far as to say, this lack of care,” Saunders told the Australian television program 60 Minutes. “… I think it’s critical that he is moved aside — that he is sent back to Australia and that the Pope takes the strongest action against him.”
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