Cardinal George Pell

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Cardinal Pell's final sermon quietly echoed themes from his fierce attacks on Pope Francis

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Cardinal Pell's final sermon quietly echoed themes from his fierce attacks on Pope Francis

Cardinal George Pell had no way to know, as he rose to preach during a spiritual retreat in southern Italy, that this was his last sermon -- opening with the biblical cry, "Repent, because the Kingdom of God is near."

Catholics should stay focused on truths proclaimed during the reigns of St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, he said, at the Shrine of St. Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo.

These popes "were missionaries of the truth. We don't build the truth. We don't have the ability to change the truth. We can only acknowledge the truth, and sometimes the truth isn't all that pretty. Sometimes the truth is disconcerting, difficult," said Pell, three days before his death on January 10, after routine hip surgery.

"These two Popes did not affirm that the teaching of Jesus was conditioned by the time, by the Roman Empire, by the pagans. They did not claim that the essential and central teaching should be updated, radically changed. They didn't say: 'We don't know what Jesus said because there were no tape recorders.' … As for them, and also for us, Jesus remains the way, the truth and the life."

On this day, the burly 6-foot-4 cardinal faced a gathering of Catholic charismatics, not an audience of Vatican power brokers. Nevertheless, this final sermon -- translated from Italian by Inside the Vatican magazine -- touched on themes in his recent writings that fueled raging debates about Pope Francis and the modernization of Catholic doctrines and worship.

In that sermon, Cardinal Pell offered only one nod to Pope Francis, while noting the potential for future popes from Africa, Asia and the Global South. "Today we have a Pope from South America -- praiseworthy and good," he said.

But after Pell's death, Italian journalist Sandro Magister revealed that the Australian cardinal -- using the pseudonym "Demos" -- had written a fierce March memo circulated to members of the College of Cardinals focusing on issues that loom over the next conclave to select a pope.

The Francis pontificate has been "a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe," this memo claimed.


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That timely AP interview: What, precisely, did Pope Francis say about homosexual 'sin'?

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That timely AP interview: What, precisely, did Pope Francis say about homosexual 'sin'?

Let’s say that Pope Francis decides to sit down for an Associated Press interview, thus guaranteeing coverage that will appear in the maximum number of mainstream publications around the world.

The basic headline is generic, but points to newsworthy topics: “Pope discusses his health, critics and future papacy.” As you would expect, editors just love a papal interview addressing the potential for a political horse race before a Vatican election (with armies of dangerous right-wing “critics” in the wings).

Now, what angle of this interview would you expect to immediately jump into headlines and social media? Maybe something like, “The AP Interview: Pope says homosexuality not a crime.”

Obviously, the reaction have been different if AP editors had used this accurate headline (written by me), based on this interview: “The AP interview — Pope says homosexual acts are sins, not crimes.”

Hold that thought. First of all, I would like to know more about the backstory for this interview. The timing is interesting, in light of recent news linked to the death of Pope Benedict XVI (“Pope Francis meets Benedict's top aide as memoir rattles Vatican") and yet another powerful conservative leader (“Cardinal Pell authored controversial memo critical of Pope Francis, journalist reveals”).

It is also possible that the timing of this interview is linked to headlines such as this one, at The Telegraph: “ ‘Gay clubs’ run in seminaries, says Pope Benedict in posthumous attack on Francis: New book by the late pontiff makes extraordinary claims about the Catholic Church under his progressive successor.”

Say what? You haven’t seen coverage of this story in your local newspapers or on evening newscasts? Here is a sample of that report:

In a blistering attack on the state of the Catholic Church under his successor’s papacy, Benedict, who died on Dec 31 at the age of 95, said that the vocational training of the next generation of priests is on the verge of “collapse”.

He claimed that some bishops allow trainee priests to watch pornographic films as an outlet for their sexual urges.


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Cardinal Pell's death puts spotlight on his words and arguments about Catholicism's future

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Cardinal Pell's death puts spotlight on his words and arguments about Catholicism's future

The Catholic church recently lost a giant. The death of Cardinal George Pell on Jan. 10 at the age of 81 was the literal loss of a giant — he stood at a towering 6-foot-6 and was once an Australian Rules Football player in his youth. But he was also a man who attracted both controversy and consternation.

Many remember Pell for what took place in the last chapter of his life — that of being found guilty of child sexual abuse in 2018. The cardinal won on appeal two years later, the convictions quashed by Australia’s High Court.

Pell also had some very real disagreements with Pope Francis regarding theology and the direction of the church in recent years — something that earned him headlines after his death calling him “divisive” and “controversial.”

Nearly two weeks after his death, Pell continues to be written about in both the secular and Catholic press. A lot of this coverage has been thin on reporting and loaded with commentary, conjecture and analysis. In fact, Pell’s death wasn’t only a reflection of the past, but where the church is headed in the future and what Francis’ papacy means.

It’s within this context — and some of the juicier revelations to come out once Pell died — that has kept journalists busy. Once again, the coverage is skewed heavily towards familiar arguments whether the church should stay true to beliefs regarding marriage and sex that go back 2,000 years or look to the future in order to mesh with the mores of the present.

It is through that prism that Pell has received coverage, especially after a secret memo Pell had penned was made public just days after his death.


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Court frees Cardinal Pell: Washington Post offers basic journalism. And the New York Times?

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This will be a very simple post about a very complicated religion-news story.

I am referring to the news that lit up Twitter the other day, when the news broke that Australia’s highest court had — with a 7-0 vote — overturned controversial (I need a stronger word) decisions by two lower courts convicting Cardinal George Pell of sexually assaulting two choirboys at the Melbourne cathedral in the 1990s.

I will not attempt to hash out the many ways that the secret nature of these Aussie court proceedings affected the news coverage. I will not discuss the details of the victim’s testimony against Pell and whether it was possible for a bishop, wearing many layers of thick, complicated vestments and almost certainly accompanied by an aide, to have committed these crimes in a public place.

No, my goal here is to contrast the journalism in two elite-media reports — in The Washington Post and then The New York Times — about this final court decision, which set Pell free and unleashed hurricanes of online arguments (yet again).

In terms of journalism, what is the essential difference between these two stories?

First, let’s look at the Post story, which ran with this headline: “Cardinal George Pell is released from prison after court quashes sexual abuse conviction.” If you read this story, you will find several passages like this:

In a written statement, Pell said he felt no ill will toward his accuser and did not want his acquittal to add to the bitterness in the community.

"There is certainly hurt and bitterness enough," he said. "However, my trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church, nor a referendum on how church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of pedophilia in the church.

"The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes, and I did not."

Readers will also read passages like this one:

The decision is likely to upset Pell's many detractors, who hold him responsible not just for the alleged assault on the choirboys but for the broader record of the Catholic Church in Australia, where some 4,444 people reported being abused in recent decades, according to an official inquiry. Their average age was about 11 years old.


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Is Cardinal Pell guilty? Some believe that how a Catholic answers signals virtue or vice

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So, is Cardinal George Pell of Australia guilty or innocent?

If you say “yes,” is that answer a form of virtue signaling during the ongoing hell of the multi-decade Catholic clergy sexual abuse crisis?

If you answer “no,” does that mean that you aren’t taking the crisis seriously and that you want bishops and priests to be able to escape justice?

If you answer “yes,” are you a loving pro-Pope Francis progressive?

If you answer “no,” does that mean that you are a hateful traditionalist who is on the wrong side of history on this issue and many others?

What if you say that you are worried about the quality of the evidence and that you are worried that public officials in Austrailia have listened to an anti-clerical mob and rushed to judgement? If you are hard questions about the evidence — like a good skeptic or journalist would — does that mean you are a hater and don’t care about the victims?

It’s somewhat unusual to run a think piece on Monday, but I really think that readers — especially journalists — will want to read the short Crux essay that ran the other day with this headline: “Ruling cements Pell’s profile as the Dreyfus or Hiss of the Catholic abuse crisis.” The author, of course, is John L. Allen, Jr.

Allen uses a genuinely scary metaphor — if you know your European history — to describe this case. Here is the key, thesis passage, after Pell’s recent appeal was rejected:

Though Pell’s judicial odyssey may not be over, [the] ruling likely does represent the final word on another aspect of the case: George Pell is now officially the Alfred Dreyfus of the Catholic abuse crisis, meaning that opinions about his guilt or innocence are at least as much a reflection of one’s ideological convictions as about the actual evidence in the case.

Dreyfus, of course, was the French artillery officer of Jewish descent charged with treason in 1894 for allegedly passing military secrets to the Germans, spending five years on Devil’s Island. Dreyfus was eventually acquitted and reinstated to his army position, but for more than a decade, opinions about his guilt or innocence functioned as a bellwether for broader political and cultural tensions, pitting Catholic and traditionalist “anti-Dreyfusards” against pro-Republican and anti-clerical liberals.


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Cardinal Pell gets sentenced, but reporters leave out some inconvenient facts -- again

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The last shoe dropped in the Cardinal Pell case yesterday with Australia’s highest prelate getting a six-year prison sentence. Reading the New York Times piece on this, one realizes that important parts of this story haven’t been told. Again.

We hear of allegations of misconduct 20 years ago involving children in a scenario that asks you to believe that a cardinal would have taken the time to molest two boys right after a busy church service in a sacristy where anyone could have walked in at any moment. No one caught him in the act. He was wearing four layers of complex, heavy vestments that usually require the assistance of another person to remove. There is one living witness/victim. It’s a classic he said, he said.

So what did the jury hear that caused them to believe the victim?

We have not seen the accuser’s evidence and we have no access to a transcript or videotape of his testimony. Something the accuser said was awfully compelling to cause them to throw the book at Pell. It’s obvious the journalists don’t know, either. From the Times:

MELBOURNE, Australia — George Pell, an Australian cardinal who was the Vatican’s chief financial officer and an adviser to Pope Francis, was sentenced to six years in prison on Wednesday, with no chance for parole for three years and eight months, for molesting two boys after Sunday Mass in 1996.

The cardinal was convicted on five counts in December, making him the most senior Catholic official — and the first bishop — to be found guilty in a criminal court for sexually abusing minors, according to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.

“I would characterize these breaches and abuses as grave,” the chief judge in the case, Peter Kidd said during the sentencing. Speaking directly to Cardinal Pell, he added: “You had time to reflect on your behavior as you offended, yet you refused to desist.”

The sentence, which by law could be up to 50 years, was closely watched around the world.

I read more than once in the comments section that accusations against Pell date back several decades and that “recovered memories” may be involved.

Really? And why are they all coming out now? With former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, his doom was set in motion two years ago when the Archdiocese of New York established a “Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program” as a new outreach to sexual abuse survivors. To the shock of the two people administering the program, a very big fish turned up in their net.


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Is Cardinal Pell a perpetrator or victim? Aussie media keep wavering between the two

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Ever since Australia’s Cardinal George Pell was convicted of child abuse, the journalism folks Down Under have been split on if he’s actually guilty or whether he’s the target of a vicious anti-Catholic campaign.

Reaction to his conviction and jailing (the sentencing isn’t until March 13), has rippled across the Pacific, prompting Ethics and Public Policy scholar George Weigel (writing at First Things) to call the Pell affair “our Dreyfus case.”

(Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jew and a military man who was wrongly pilloried and imprisoned in 1894 on charges of selling secrets to the Germans. He was declared innocent in 1906, but the matter was considered as barbaric anti-Semitism on the part of the French. The conflict tore at the heart of French society.)

I’ll get back to Weigel in a moment but first I want to quote from a piece BBC recently ran on all this.

Cardinal George Pell is awaiting sentencing for sexually abusing two boys in 1996. The verdict, which he is appealing against, has stunned and divided Australia in the past week.

It has sparked strong reactions from the cardinal's most prominent supporters, some of whom have cast doubt on his conviction in a wider attack on Australia's legal system.

The largely conservative backlash features some of Australia's most prominent media figures, a university vice-chancellor and a leading Jesuit academic, among others.

Former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott also continue to maintain their public support for the ex-Vatican treasurer.

The reporter then reports on her visit to St. Mary’s Cathedral in downtown Sydney where the parishioners predictably claimed that Pell is innocent. The reporter then interviews another journalist who has an obvious vested interest in Pell (notice the book title) being guilty.

Such stances have caused profound hurt to survivors, says ABC journalist Louise Milligan, author of the book Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell.

"I've been contacted by many, many Australian Catholics who are devastated by the way the Church is handling this issue," Milligan told the BBC.

"They are also greatly upset that political leaders continue to side with a convicted paedophile — and that is what Pell is, a convicted paedophile — over his vulnerable victim and the grieving family of his other victim." (One victim died of a drug overdose in 2014.)

The article then swings back to Pell’s defense.


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Cardinal Pell story is an extremely tangled web, but readers need alternative media to know that

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I hadn’t been following the child abuse charges against Australian Cardinal Pell all that much because I assumed, based on the evidence, that they were somewhat plimsy and would never stick.

But they did — in a series of trials that are as odd as they come. At the heart of the proceedings there was a single witness and what appeared to be “recovered memories” of abuse.

The end result? A cardinal is now in jail and a bunch of journalists have been handed the Aussie equivalent of contempt-of-court charges.

This is a complex story that I’ll do my best to break down, starting with what CruxNow ran in December:

NEW YORK — In a decision that will undoubtedly create shockwaves around the globe, Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Church official to stand trial for sexual abuse, was found guilty on Tuesday by a Melbourne court.

In one of the most closely watched trials in modern Catholic Church history, after nearly four full days of deliberations, a jury rendered unanimous guilty verdicts on five charges related to the abuse of two choirboys in 1996.

The trial, which began on November 7, has been subject to a media blackout at the request of the prosecution, and follows a first trial in September ended after a jury failed to reach consensus.

Pell, who is 77 years old, is currently on a leave of absence from his post as the Vatican’s Secretary for the Economy.

In June 2017, Pell was charged by Australian police with “historical sexual assault offences,” forcing him to leave Rome and return home vowing to “clear his name.”

Technically, CruxNow wasn’t supposed to run that story because of this media blackout, aka a suppression order, that media around the world were supposed to follow. Of course, lots of news sources outside of Australia’s borders refused to go along.

The charges concern a claim that Pell sexually abused two male altar boys about 20 years ago when he was archbishop of Melbourne and that he did so on several occasions following Sunday Mass.

His lawyers have said that Pell was constantly surrounded by other clergy after Mass and there’s not a chance he could have gotten alone with some altar boys. Also, the sexual acts he’s accused of performing are impossible considering the voluminous, complex layers of liturgical vestments he would have been wearing — vestments that require the help of a second cleric to put on and remove.


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Pounding George Pell in the press: The cardinal takes a hit from the Gray Lady

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The “trial of the century” of Cardinal George Pell -- the Vatican’s “number 3” man and head of its finances - on sexual abuse charges has been passed by a Melbourne Magistrate to the Victoria County Court for adjudication. On April 30, Magistrate Belinda Wallington found there was sufficient evidence to justify a trial for the 76-year old former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, who has been placed on leave by Pope Francis to respond to the charges.

The case has been closely followed by the Australian and Italian press for the past three years, while the US and British press has also covered the spectacle. The coverage has been all over the map. 

Some outlets, like The Australian, have done a thorough balanced job -- others like the New York Times have fallen short in their professional standards. Conservative Catholic blogs have long criticized the coverage of the Pell case as  against the cardinal -- and part of the larger battle of doctrine being waged between progressives and traditionalists within the church.

Not unexpectedly, the Italian press has viewed the Pell case on advocacy-journalism lines - the anti-clerical or liberal papers have already found him guilty, the Catholic papers see him as a martyr to police misconduct, media bias and anti-Catholic sentiment, while the center plays it down the middle with a ‘too soon to tell’ what to think about George Pell approach.

When the charges surfaced last year, the Australian Associated Press (AAP) observed:

The centrist Corriere Della Sera newspaper noted the cardinal was "the highest representative of the Catholic Church every involved in such a case". The liberal La Repubblica warned "the shadow of pedophilia and rape returns to obscure the church". It described the cardinal as the "controversial kangaroo" and branded Australia as "a paradise of the orcs", saying in the past seven per cent of priests had been accused of sexual assault.

Today’s headlines from Italy follow this pattern. The lede in La Repubblica’s story “Abusi sessuali e pedofilia, il cardinale Pell rinviato a giudizio in Australia” (Sexual abuse and paedophilia -- Cardinal Pell indicted in Australia) states: 


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