SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
Church Militant
December 14, 2018
By an Australian correspondent in Sydney
Cardinal George Pell, formerly the Pope’s right-hand man for Vatican finances and the face of the Catholic Church in Australia, has been convicted of abusing two choir boys when he was Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.
Pell has categorically denied the allegations.
Although this is the biggest news story in Australia, it is not on the front page of a single newspaper here. The state of Victoria, where Pell was tried, has imposed a suppression order that bans all reporting and comment. So Australians are resorting to overseas websites and Twitter for news.
The full-page headline in The Daily Telegraph, of Sydney, one of Australia’s biggest newspapers, was “It’s the Nation’s Biggest Story” — “yet we can’t publish it.” So there are no facts to discuss — other than the brutal fact that a cardinal has been convicted in a court of law for abusing boys. Who, when, where, how, why are all matters of surmise.
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