KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
March 4, 2019
By Paul Collins
Tuesday, February 26, 2019, will go down as probably the worst day yet in the entire 231 year-long history of Australian Catholicism. We thought we’d seen it all during the four years of Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, especially as terrible stories of mistreatment of children by clergy and in Catholic institutions were recounted. But George Pell’s conviction leaves that shame for dead. Australian Catholics are stunned, outraged and angry at the lack of accountability and betrayal as we are left utterly leaderless by bishops who seem to have run for deep cover from faithful Catholics and everyone else.
First, the facts of Pell’s conviction. There were two sets of charges. The first concerned two incidents in December 1996 and early 1997 in Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral soon after Pell was appointed archbishop there. After a three-week trial, he was found guilty on December 11, 2018, of sexually penetrating a 13-year-old choirboy, as well as four charges of indecent acts with the same choirboy and another choirboy.
However, there was another set of charges of indecent assault of boys in a swimming pool in Pell’s hometown of Ballarat in the 1970s when he was a priest. These charges had not come to trial, so Judge Peter Kidd imposed a media gag order so that potential jurors would not know and be influenced by the cathedral convictions. But in the social media age, such gags are useless and when the Ballarat charges were dropped by prosecutors last Tuesday, the order was lifted and the firestorm began.
Pell strongly maintains his innocence and has appealed; it will probably be several months before the appeal is heard. Some Catholics, among them progressives, think the appeal is based on strong grounds and that Pell will be found innocent. They see him as a scapegoat for all of the failures and mistakes of Catholic leadership. Other Catholics accept the guilty verdict and feel the appeal is based on flimsy grounds.
There is seething anger within the wider Australian community, much of it fanned by social media, about sexual abuse and church cover-ups. Following Pell’s conviction this has exploded. “Catholicism” is now a dirty word in Australia, and as in most Anglophone countries there’s deep-seated sectarian bigotry against Catholics which surfaces in times like these.
Beyond anger and outrage, what is really going on here?
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