The preposterous case against Cardinal Pell

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 27, 2019

Cardinal Pell has been convicted of molesting two young men. One of those alleged victims, who is now deceased, denied having been molested. Think about that for a moment: the cardinal stands convicted of a crime that, according to the supposed victim, did not occur.

There’s another alleged victim, of course. He waited years to tell anyone that he had been abused, but that’s not unusual in such cases. (Still it might be noteworthy that the only witness against Pell found his voice just at the time when the cardinal, in his campaign for financial transparency at the Vatican, was rattling the cages of big-money interests.) The accuser could not provide any evidence to back up his story, and that story was full of holes:

• He claimed that he and the other alleged victims, who were choirboys, slipped away from the choir. But nobody noticed that they were missing, and other choir members find it unlikely that they could have stolen away unnoticed.
• He claimed that they were in the sacristy drinking wine. He said it was red wine. But the only altar wine in use was white.
• He claimed that the cardinal came into the sacristy alone and caught them. But the cardinal was invariably outside the cathedral after ceremonies, greeting the congregation. When he did return to the sacristy, he was always—always—accompanied by other priests.
• He claimed that the cardinal parted his vestments and molested them. But the vestments that the cardinal wore did not allow for the movement the alleged victim described.

How did an Australian court reach a conviction, without any evidence, on the basis of such shaky testimony? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “the fix was in”—that this was the genteel Australian equivalent of the “show trials” that resulted in convictions for other prelates who were unpopular with Communist regimes in the 1950s.

If there’s any justice at all in the Australian system, Cardinal Pell will win his appeal. But the appeal process will likely take months, and meanwhile he is in jail.