AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
February 27, 2016
Peter FitzSimons
Columnist
Stand by, Australia.
This will be the week that Cardinal George Pell, a pillar of the Catholic Church in Australia for much of the last four decades, and now the third most powerful figure at the Vatican, faces the Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse.
Sadly he will not be be giving his evidence in Australia, as – despite being capable of continuing his normal work running the Vatican finances – 24 hours in a Qantas First Class is quite beyond him.
And yes, even that light observation will no doubt get the hackles up of the Cardinal’s few remaining defenders. But I’d invite them to read my erstwhile colleague David Marr’s devastating piece in The Guardian this week.
With forensic fervour, Marr dissects Cardinal Pell’s position noting that, even though the abuse of children was happening all around him for 30 years, even though many witnesses have come forward and explicitly testified that they TOLD Pell it was going on, still the Cardinal maintains “he knew nothing – nothing while he was a priest in Ballarat about the paedophiles around him, and little about these men and their victims in his years as an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne. He was never in the loop. No one warned him. No one complained to him. He didn’t read that letter or this report. It never came up at meetings. There’s nothing in the minutes. There’s nothing in the files.”
It will, of course, be for the Royal Commission to wade through all that, and Marr makes the point that this will likely be the last chance to actually get to the bottom of it.
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