Rorate Caeli

PELL - PART 3: the Scapegoating and Witch-Hunt of a Hero of the Faith (The Royal Commission and in Court)

 PELL : the Scapegoating and Witch-Hunt of a Hero of the Faith



Part III of III

[Part I; Part II]


When Pope Francis was elected in 2013, Pell initially seemed to rise to new heights in the Vatican, serving as the clear conservative of Pope Francis Cardinal advisors and as the prefect for the new Secretariat for the Economy.


His experiences in Rome would have Pell go from a conservative who supported Pope Francis’ reforms, to a disillusioned and disappointed critic who was upset about Francis failing to end corruption in the Vatican, instead enabling it, and who is rumoured to have (co-)authored the demos memo’, critical of Pope Francis, that was shared withother cardinals.


In spite of disagreeing with Pope Francis’ lax stance on sexual ethics and doctrinal matters, Pell took his part in the planned financial reforms very seriously, tirelessly pursuing a corruption crackdown not even sparing important Vatican prelatesHe ended up making enemies and found himself abandoned by Pope Francishaving his wings clipped when he ended up investigating Cardinal Becciu, the right-hand man of secretary of state Cardinal Parolin.


At the same time, as previously mentioned, the anti-Pell campaign was being revived in Australia. In spite of the fact that Pell had been a pioneer in setting up a response mechanism and redress system for abuse victims, while purging his Archdiocese of abusers enabled by his modernist predecessor Frank Little, media and activists still tried to painthim as the bad guy. It then escalated to Pell being accused of having sexually abused children himself.


This campaign ended up getting Pell convicted and unjustly imprisoned for over a year, before he was unanimously acquitted by the High Court of Australia in a 7-0 decision. Ironically this miscarriage of justice followed by Pell’s unanimous vindication ended up drawing far greater attention to the unjust treatment Pell had suffered for years. It discredited the campaign against him and increased Pell’s status within the Church instead.


The entire ordeal Pell endured from 2012 till 2020 deserves a closer look. It shows the extent of anti-Catholicism in the secular media in the West, how conservative bishops can be blamed for the failures of modernist bishops and how the politicization of child sexual abuse doesn’t actually help the victims.


From state inquiries to a Royal Commission


After the Victoria Police became engulfed into scandal and attempted to scapegoat the Catholic Church around 2011, the parliamentary inquiry in Victoria refuted various false claims and confirmed that the Melbourne Response set up by Cardinal Pell had functioned properly. This did not cause the Victoria Police to stop, nor the circulation of false accusation to wind down. Instead, things only escalated with even more blatantly false accusations against Pell and other Australian bishops


At the same time in 2012, police detective Peter Fox in New South Wales leaked police information to the press and made claims about a conspiracy involving police officials and Catholic clergy. Another inquiry was held in New South Wales which ended up deeming Fox as not credible and having acted unprofessionally and rejecting the conspiracy claims in 2014. It did fault some diocesan clergy and one bishop for not reporting abuse but nothing incriminating against Pell. Peter Fox remained undeterred, however, and also ended up settinghis sights on Pell. He even became close to Bernard Barrett from Broken Rites who had had a dubious role in the attackson Pell by Scott in 2002 and as Chris Friel has noted became the only person to call him Bernie.[1]


Australian prime minister Julia Gillard decided to get ahead of things, however, and set up a Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. Important to note is that roughly half of the commissioners had no legal background at all. The judge presiding over it, Peter McClellan, had actually come to embrace believe in the discredited pseudo-scientific notion of repressed and recovered memories.

The notion that children could completely repress memories of abuse only to later recover them (often under influence of therapy) was popular during the 80s and 90s, resulting in many innocent people being convicted based on false and induced memories which were taken to be authentic and recovered memories. Yet, McClellan both supported the theory and those who promote bitCathy Kezelman, president of the Blue Knot Foundation, an advocacy group for adults who claim they were sexually abused as children, who herself claims to have recovered memories that her father abused her with the approval of her grandmother, was called an ‘old friend’ of the Royal Commission by McClellan. She detailed her alleged recovered memories of abuse in her Innocence Revisited: A Tale in Parts (JoJo Publishing, 2010). Kezelman’sown claims of childhood abuse were likewise deemed to be false by both her elderly mother and also her brother.[2] In spite of this, her advice was highly valued by the Royal Commission.


The fact that the Royal Commission supported those who peddled discredited pseudoscience has not gotten nearly the attention it should have. It calls into question McClellan’s objectivity. This is further compounded by the fact that one of the few other people involved who had legal experience, Gail Furness, is a practicing lesbian who displayed bias and hostility against Pell from the beginning.[3]


A Royal Commission consists of political appointees linked tothe government. While they are not court of law, their findings tended to be treated as proof of guilt, which was specifically done by the critics of Pell, who used the opinions of commissioners to smear the cardinal. Yet, commissioners in the context of hearings can act both as prosecutors and judges. They are not bound by the rules of evidence, not required to even appear impartial, not bound to the burden of proof andnot required to treat citizens equally.

To treat the opinions of commissioners as a guilty verdict is to do away with fair trials. Similar to totalitarian regimes where so called special and political courts replace the function of independent courts of law.


Selective focus, dodgy statistics and confirmation biases


The political nature of the Commission also became clear due to whom it did and didn’t shine the spotlight on. The Royal Commission did not hold public hearings into Islamic institutions, in spite of Islam having become the third largest religion in Australia. Aboriginal communities were similarly exempt from scrutiny, while state-run institutions got off easy,too. The Commission really cared about certain victims of sexual abuse, but other victims didn’t matter nearly as much,apparently. 


In the end, however, even the liberal Commission could not deny that the highpoint of the abuse had been throughout the 60s to the 80s when the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ reigned supreme in the Church and liberal bishops and priests dominated nor that abuse had decreased from the 90s onwards. They couldn’t even deny that the accusations made by the Victoria Police,that had been refuted by the Victoria inquiry, were indeed bogus. 


Yet, this wasn’t what was given prominent attention by the media or even by the Commission itself. Instead extremely high numbers of alleged abuse cases throughout the decades were provided as well as various unsubstantiated claims against Pell.


It was claimed that 7 % of priests were accused of child sexual abuse, that 1880 people had allegedly been accused and thatthere had been 4444 claims of abuse in total. These numbers have been expertly debunked by commentator Geoffrey Luck.[4]


But this is not what it seems. Those are not the figures for the whole Catholic society. They are based on the 75 authorities with priest members which the Royal Commission surveyed..


The ABC dramatically displayed in a graphic the abuse proportions for various orders – 20.4% for Marist Brothers, 22% for Christian Brothers, 40.4% for St John of God Brothers.


Can anyone really believe these figures? They were obtained by dividing the number of “alleged perpetrators” in each category – distributed from the 1,880 total – by the total number of brothers in the order. The raw data was not provided in her address, but tabled for the Commission, and is not, as yet anyway, publicly available.


The real problem here is that the Royal Commission and its Council Assisting are happy to ply the public with raw numbers on different bases, unchecked, untested and unverified. After four years, and in the case of the Catholic Church untold hours of evidence in pursuit of prelates, it has not authenticated the vast bulk of claims or proven “alleged perpetrators” guilty or innocent. My impression is that it doesn’t want to spoil the impact of its numbers.


Finally, he pointed out that of the 1880 alleged abusers, 500 could not be named or identified, leaving open the possibility that at least some (if not most) of them were amongst the other accused priests who could be named. As such it could be anywhere between 1380 and 1880 (alleged) abusers which by itself further calls the 7 % claim into doubt.


Luck additionally pointed out that he had provided a detailed submission to the Commission showing that one accuser’s story was likely false and that he had previously tried to extort a Catholic school through a false accusation, but that the Commission asserted this was outside of its terms of reference.

There was a lot of time and countless public hearings on the Catholic Church. Labor backbencher Doug Cameron claimed that the Catholic Church should be the focus of any commission, since according to him 'that's where the major problem seems to be'. This resulted in a process of biased self-confirmation. Anti-Catholics allege and speculate that abuse is disproportionately a problem with Catholicism. They then ensure governmental authorities investigate Catholicism disproportionately, while giving little attention to victims within other denominations, resulting in the collection and analysis of more abuse complaints for Catholicism than for other denominations. This problem was confounded further by the fact that the anti-Catholic biases started in part due to false claims by both Peter Fox and Vic Pol.


An important aside: there was a false claim that the Melbourne Response had mainly served to limit payouts to victims. A source, that unfortunately seems to be lost now, eloquently refuted this, however:


“The suggestion that only the Archdiocese has avoided making redress payments based on the payments made to those who have settled civil claims also ignores the information published by the Royal Commission from state governments who have operated their own redress schemes and which demonstrate that the Archdiocese by comparison has compensated victims at more than four times the average of Queensland of $10,296, three times the average of South Australia of $14,100, twice the average of Western Australia of $22,458 and more than $16,000 above the average payments in Tasmania of $29,653.”


Abuse in liberal churches skipped over


The Uniting Church of Australia reported 2504 abuse complaints covering a 40 year period (1977-2017) compared to the 4444 complaints regarding Catholicism throughout a 60 year period (1950-2010). The numbers throughout the years seem remarkably close, but those are simply the number of abuse cases. The Uniting Church throughout the decades was significantly smaller and had less children under its care and less adults working with children. As such, the number of complaints should have been significantly lower, yet, it wasn’t.


Where was the criticism of the Uniting Church’s permissive liberal culture leading to disproportionate amounts of abuse?Shouldn’t the Royal Commission have investigated this? Part of the reason it didn’t, may have been the fact that its senior counsel consisted of men such as an ex-Catholic priest,Desmond Cahill. Cahill has been a progressive anti-Catholic for decades, ever since he left the priesthood.


Years before the Commission provided its dubious 7 % claim, Cahill speculated 5 to 10 % of priests were abusers, and as such a larger proportion then the general population, based on his odd interpretation of the earlier John Jay report.[5]


"I remain comfortable with that figure and the incidence is much higher than in the general population and much higher than for any other professional group," Cahill told the parliamentary inquiry.


Cahill had a role in the Commission that provided numbers confirming his claims, without engaging in proper falsification. Cahill then made recommendations, together with another ex-Catholic priest, Peter Wilkinson from ‘Catholics for renewal’ to unconstitutionally limit religious freedom for Catholics and force reforms on the Church, such as the abolishment of priestly celibacy and episcopal authority, to make it more like the Uniting Church. Allegedly this would be to fix the disproportionate abuse problem they assumed and then attempted to prove the Catholic Church has.


Bill Donohue from Catholic League helped to perfectly debunk these self-serving and ideological claims.[6]


The authors know that if celibacy were the cause of sexual abuse, there never would have been a sudden increase in offenses beginning in the 1960s, so the best they can do is to say it plays a role “when combined with other risk factors.” The truth is their opposition to celibacy reflects their politics, not the data


Cahill and Wilkinson blame the Church’s “homophobic environment” for the scandal. But if homophobia accounts for the sexual abuse of minors, why didn’t the scandal take place in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s? After all, would not everyone agree that that would be the most likely time, in recent history, for so-called homophobia to balloon? Similarly, why did the explosion in priestly sexual abuse take place when sexual norms in the seminaries were relaxed, if not abandoned altogether? Paradoxically, even the authors offer evidence that makes our point, not theirs.


Citing the 2011 John Jay report, they readily admit that “Men ordained in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s did not generally abuse before the 1960s or 1970s. Men ordained in the 1960s and the early 1970s engaged in abuse behaviour much more quickly after their entrance into ministry.”


Donohue rightly pointed out that the statistics supported by Cahill and Wilkinson, in fact confirm sexual abuse became worse in the Catholic Church and society during the sexual revolution.


In other words, the more tolerant the Church became of homosexuality, and the less “homophobic” it became, the more homosexual priests began preying on young men. Not to acknowledge this is intellectually dishonest.


The authors are so thoroughly compromised that they make the positively absurd statement that “the majority of offenders were heterosexual even if they abused young boys.” This is twice wrong: (a) most of the victims were not “young boys”—they were adolescents, and (b) it is delusional to say that same-sex acts are acts of heterosexuality.


I would add that it’s odd that a ‘homophobic environment’ would contribute to heterosexual men having problems with their heterosexual orientation that ends with them molesting boys. 

Cahill and Wilkinson even had the audacity to claim that Humanae Vitae had played an important role in the abuse crisis.[7] They asserted that it’s widespread rejection in the West meant there was no proper accepted authority on sexual ethics anymore and there was no proper consensus on rejection child sexual abuse. Yet, if Rome had gone with the winds of the time it would have ceased being a unifying authority anyways and the winds of 1968 were strongly in favour of normalizing sex with children.[8]


Progressive pro-birth control protestants in Germany and the Netherlands were openly supportive of sex with children. This is a fact of history. In 1979 there was a petition in the Netherlands, calling for the age of consent to be completely abolished, signed by Liberal Reformed youth groups and protestant groups supportive of birth control.[9] Humanists in West-Germany were supportive of similar initiatives during the sexual revolution.[10] Liberal sexual ethics are not the cure for any paedophilia problem in any church or society.

Liberal theologians had angrily attacked Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI when he reminded the world of this. Denying the documented fact that sex with children was supported by multiple progressive German parties, including the Green Party[11], and falsely asserting abuse was common in the Catholic Church long before the sexual revolution.


The Nazis had tried to claim that abuse was widespread within the Catholic Church during the 1930s, but in spite of their Gestapo, SS and totalitarian power, they were only able to accuse about 300 priests and monks, and less than a 30 turned out to actually be guilty. The Nazis had to resort to making false claims and the regular German courts were still independent enough in how they dealt with matters of fact (as opposed to matters of law) that they rejected the spurious accusations.[12]


Abuse in the Catholic Church in the 1930s was extremely rare, precisely at a time that its bishops were still mostly ultramontanist, adhered to Casti Connubii and rejected artificial contraception and modernist views on sexuality, when celibacy was vigourously enforced and a patriarchal culture reigned supreme.


The massive abuse problem in the Uniting Church was a problem for Cahill’s narrative. Gerard Henderson from the Sidney Institute pointed out that no one from the Royal Commission had questioned the even worse abuse problem in the Uniting Church. Cahill ended up disputing it, though resulting in a brief, but ultimately inconclusive, email exchange in September of 2017Henderson countered each of Cahill’s objections with sharp questions. Cahill claimed he needed to return to Australia before continuing the conversation, but Henderson pointed out they were discussing statistics in the public record. The final mail was by Henderson.[13]


What got little attention is that shortly afterwards, in October, the Uniting Church suddenly revised its abuse statistics from more than 2500 to roughly 400 in a rather untransparent manner, with approval from the Royal Commission.[14]


Pell vindicated, yet attacked anyways


Even Gail Furness ended up rejecting David Ridsdale’s accusation against Pell, as making little sense. Yet, she did not call him a liar and stated she did not doubt that he believed his story that Pell had tried to bribe his silence. Furness gave a surprising benefit of the doubt to a man who had lied about the nature and extent of his own crime of sexual abuse against a minor. Others accusations, too, weren’t simply unconfirmed or unlikely, but positively proven false.


Pell was accused of having done nothing in 1969, when a boy came to ask for help against a molester, but Pell’s passport confirmed he was in Rome throughout the entire year.


Pell was likewise accused of joking with another priest about serial abuser Gerald Ridsdale committing sexual during a funeral Mass in Ballarat, but it turned out there was no funeral mass that day and the alleged priest Pell had supposedly told the joke to denied it.


The most noteworthy false accusation of enabling abuse was again described perfectly by Catholic League[15]


At a later date, Pell was accused of chasing away a complainant who informed him of a molesting priest. The authorities dismissed the charges after discovering that Pell did not live at the presbytery in Ballarat where the encounter allegedly took place. The accuser was later imprisoned for sexually abusing children.


The fact that Pell has faced multiple accusations that weren’t just unsubstantiated, but outright proven false, impossible and sometimes completely fictional, should give reason to think.Even more so, when multiple false accusations were in fact made by child sexual abusers. Why have paedophiles been keen to falsely label Pell as a child abuse enabler? Why do they seek to discredit Pell?


The repeated exonerations of Pell got as little attention as the disproportionate abuse in the Uniting Church. Even worse was how the Commission ended up de facto rewarding the Victoria Police for attempting to shift the blame by making false assertions regarding the Melbourne Response.


While there had been no grand conspiracy in the police of New South Wales, the Victoria Police had in fact often behaved unethically and irresponsibly and had had an important role in enabling abuse by pederast priests. Yet, both this fact and the attempts of the Victoria Police to scapegoat Pell and the Melbourne Response, received little attention from the Royal Commission and were instead overshadowed by the focus on extrapolated and speculative numbers of abuse cases (for Catholics, again, not for Muslims). This even overshadowed other scandals involving Victoria Police, including the now infamous Lawyer X scandal. After the Commission wrapped up, released messages showed members of Vic Pol had expressed hope that new scandals involving Pell would knock their scandals of the front page. 


Conclusion


The Royal Commission served to mainly stir up media attacks against the Catholic Churchbut failed to show consistent compassion for victims when their suffering didn’t serve the progressive narrative. In the end, it’s actual political impactturned out to be limited, as Labour unexpectedly lost the 2019 federal elections. It’s judicial impact was likewise limited, due to several High Court rulings, and its impact on the Church deflated together with Pope Francis’ whole synodal project. Pell ended up having the last laugh.


However, while the Commissioners were forced to reject many of the false claims against Pell and the Melbourne Response, in matters where evidence did not exonerate him beyond every possible doubt, they let their biases show. These opinions had to be redacted for years, since Pell was facing ridiculous charges in criminal court that had to be resolved first, before they could be publicly released. Both the redacted sections of the report and the criminal prosecution of Pell read as something right out of a Kafka story, but this deserves a full analysis by itself.


 —


Notes:

[1]https://www.academia.edu/43623601/Connections_and_the_Committal

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/child-abuse-activist-cathy-kezelman-hits-back-over-false-memory-claims-20170930-gyrudb.html

[3] https://thesydneyinstitute.com.au/blog/issue-343/

[4] https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/the-royal-commissions-dodgy-sex-abuse-stats/news-story/2ef6c92844cb268a4f68e111ede17c3d

[5] https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2012/09_10/2012_10_23_McArthur_DesCahill.htm

[6] https://www.catholicleague.org/australian-abuse-report-deeply-flawed-2/

[7] https://www.votf.org/wp-content/uploads/Australia-abuse-review2017.pdf

[8] https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-children-how-the-left-took-things-too-far-a-702679.html

[9]https://brongersma.info/Petitie_inzake_leeftijdsgrenzen_in_de_zedelijkheidswetgeving

[10] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6026966/#fn7-002436311803888294

[11] https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/german-greens-leader-sorry-for-1980s-call-to-decriminalize-sex-with-minors-idUSBRE98F0FK/

[12] https://www.cesnur.org/2010/mi-goebbels_en.html

[13] https://thesydneyinstitute.com.au/blog/issue-380/

[14] https://crosslight.org.au/2017/10/23/uca-child-sex-abuse-figures-revised/

[15] https://www.catholicleague.org/war-against-cardinal-pell/