tigermike said:
Yes, it's a grave responsibility, lives hinging on the merits of performance on video. Reports said the first jury emerged distressed, and five of them were in tears.
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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Cardinal George Pell, The Catholic Church and Child Sex Abuse
- Thread starter Tigers of Old
- Start date
Yes, it's a grave responsibility, lives hinging on the merits of performance on video. Reports said the first jury emerged distressed, and five of them were in tears.
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easy_tiger
Guest
Panthera Tigris said:
I think people who mix doctrines, ideologies and beleifs are mostly the smartest. Takes cognitive sophistication.
FWIW, my old man sat next to Pell for years at high school ( not through friendship, but through a semi-sadistic, perhaps pedagogically clever, pitting of intellects and ideologies)
I obviously dont need to elaborate on the formative meassages i got on Pell and Catholicism.
Another trivial but relevant anecdote ...
As a pubescent boy, the parish priest would quiz the old man about his 'impure thoughts' during confessions. Dad could hear him masturbating and would manufacture some really impure ones just to finish him off and get out of there
LeeToRainesToRoach said:
As i said, i recently served 2 weeks as foreman of jury on a child sex case ( extremely unpleasant, disfunctional family incest) and drank a bottle of wine a night and barely slept.
Yes as I suggested earlier, the Catholic Priesthood has been known as a cesspit of sexual (often sadistic) deviance for years and years. I remember both of my grandfathers referring to the Catholics as a bunch of "kiddy fiddler, perverts & p...ters" when I was young (sure, an element of sectarianism and homophobia to their opinion, but not like they were particularly far off track either). So not like it wasn't a known phenomenon to their generation. So it's tragic it's taken to recent years to come to a head.easy said:
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easy_tiger
Guest
Panthera Tigris said:
Its arguably the greatest hoax's of the civilised world?
A place where the community gives vast sums of money and property and passively offer up their boys as sex sacrifices to an organised gang of pedophiles who dress up in strange costumes and tell elaborate, manipulative stories.
I wonder if the day will come when newspapers describe them as
'men of catholic appearance'
Or 'outlawed catholic pedophile gang'
I mean, jesus sounded like a lovely bloke, but the middlemen built some racket
And look, I mentioned earlier that my family were notionally (although, not overly practicing) Protestant. And while yes, I acknowledge that some Protestant denominations haven't been entirely innocent in all of this (for example, look up some of the charges that have come out of the Church of England Boys’ Society around Australia). They don't seem to have had the same accepted, ritualised culture of paedophilia as the Catholic Church.easy said:
And in this context, your point about the middleman is actually very valid. Again, going back to Protestantism. No protestant denominations have the extensive hierarchy that Catholicism does. This is the entire point of Protestantism. However, it seems the bigger the middleman (hierarchy) the greater the correlation with this kind of perverted corruption. The Anglican Church of course, seemingly having a greater issue with this than any other Protestant denomination, is not so coincidentally the Protestant Church with perhaps the most formal hierarchy (or middleman).
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easy_tiger
Guest
Panthera Tigris said:
Its an interesting point PT
But arent the catholics the only ones with chastity vows?
I mean, 'chaste' men pastorally caring for young boys?
Its like leaving a starving seal to shepard a school of sardines
Yes, the whole chastity thing, I always found quite peculiar and bizarre. Without going into gory details, as a red blooded male with testosterone, I'd find that an extremely unnatural state to try and maintain. 1) It means you attract mainly social misfits and 2) Maintaining such an unnatural state is a recipe for disaster.easy said:
I was Christened into a Uniting Church (essentially a church made up of Methodists and Presbyterians) and had a small stint going to Sunday School there as a child. Not that I really ever bought into the whole God/spiritual side of things (too much of a pragmatic person for that). But they probably influenced some of my moral and social compass. All of the Ministers and teachers there (men and women by the way in their ministry, even back in the 1980s) seemed to be married with quite a few children. Their interpretation seemed to be that a committed sexual relationship between a man and a woman was one of the central gifts that god had gifted people, so marriage between men and women was one of the central pillars of society. Therefore they saw themselves as walking the talk and being an example of what a good Christian person does.
In this context, the Catholic interpretation that monks/priests needed to be essentially married to god, and be celibate just makes no sense.
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easy_tiger
Guest
I think their only real chance to retain a tiny portion of market share in Australia,
Is to rebadge as The Latter Day Church of Pedophilia,
Canonize Howard (they wouldnt have to change the signs on many of their shopfronts),
And hope blokes like Bolt and Abbott breed like all buggery, excuse the pun, and spread the word.
They could ditch the bit about the meek inheriting the earth during their reformation, and hope to capture the custom of Bernadi and his outfit?
They could sing hyms like 'tie me kangaroo down sport'
Imagine the spectacle of the heavily robed priests (with redesigned quick release velcro flys) chanting and shuffling to 'im jake the peg diddle iddle iddle iddle um'
And when they de-velcro and expose themselves,
The small but devoted congregation responds, in unison, joyously,
'With an extra leg, diddle iddle iddle UM!'
Is to rebadge as The Latter Day Church of Pedophilia,
Canonize Howard (they wouldnt have to change the signs on many of their shopfronts),
And hope blokes like Bolt and Abbott breed like all buggery, excuse the pun, and spread the word.
They could ditch the bit about the meek inheriting the earth during their reformation, and hope to capture the custom of Bernadi and his outfit?
They could sing hyms like 'tie me kangaroo down sport'
Imagine the spectacle of the heavily robed priests (with redesigned quick release velcro flys) chanting and shuffling to 'im jake the peg diddle iddle iddle iddle um'
And when they de-velcro and expose themselves,
The small but devoted congregation responds, in unison, joyously,
'With an extra leg, diddle iddle iddle UM!'
E
easy_tiger
Guest
MD Jazz said:
Your talking to the president of the Vegan cattle growers association, the whitest black man East of Nimbin , and the richest man without any money in the southern hemisphere, sunshine.
Besides, ive never claimed to be cognitively sophisticated.
I only really think about 2 things besides Richmond
Bolt has old white catholic guy on his show to get his reaction to the verdict. And let’s him rave on uninterrupted saying Pell could not have done it. He argued how could pell set up the taskforce to investigate the church’s offences but at the same time abuse kids himself? WTF? It’s like saying how could a Cub Scout leader ever abuse kids? Moronic.
Bolt is a cancer on society. He keeps saying alleged offences. He was found guilty Andrew, right now he is a convicted child abuser.
Bolt is a cancer on society. He keeps saying alleged offences. He was found guilty Andrew, right now he is a convicted child abuser.
tigerman said:
Not only that, Richter is considered to be the best cross-examining lawyer in the land, law nerds go to watch him in action, the dusty of the courtroom. And he got done.
George Pell: This saga has a long way to go yet (paywalled)
Tess Livingstone
The Australian
March 1, 2019
While Cardinal George Pell is under lock and key, awaiting sentencing for guilty verdicts on five serious child sexual abuse charges, ongoing unease in some quarters about the soundness of those verdicts makes them worthy of scrutiny.
Only two options present themselves — first, that Pell is a sacrilegious hypocrite, with the agility of Houdini; or second, that an alarming miscarriage of justice has played out at the hands of the Victorian justice system. There can be no middle ground. The saga now shifts to the Victorian Court of Appeal.
The guilty verdict was delivered in December by a unanimous jury, in a properly constituted court, after an earlier jury was dismissed on September 20 because it split 10-2 in Pell’s favour. Hence the second trial, in which many people, whether they like or loathe Pell and all he stands for, believe went badly wrong.
If so, the jury were not the only ones to get it wrong, nor the most culpable. Hard questions need to be asked about police and judicial processes, including how and why certain allegations ever made it to court, let alone to trial.
During the first trial, observers in the gallery claimed: “Even if he didn’t do it he deserves to be punished. He was in charge of the whole show’’. How much did such sentiments influence the verdicts, if at all? Australian justice cannot sink so low.
Studied closely, the five convictions of child sexual abuse are grotesque, implausible and break the bounds of credulity. In religious terms, they would be grave sacrileges.
Four offences purportedly took place over a six minute period in the sacristy (robing room) of the cathedral in late 1996, against two 13 year-old boys, immediately after the Sunday Solemn Mass. The fifth supposedly took place at around the same time of day, also on a Sunday Mass, in the cathedral corridors about a month later, against one boy.
The logistics were incredible. When Pell became archbishop of Melbourne in August 1996, St Patrick’s was closed for renovations, leaving only two dates on which he celebrated Sunday Mass at the Cathedral — December 15 and December 22nd. Yet the charges, initially at least, related to incidents in 1996, allegedly “a month apart”.
Pell’s counsel, Robert Richter QC raised the issue of timing at the opening of the second trial, noting that the police investigation failed to establish proper dates and that after the defence did so, the prosecution changed the date of the fifth alleged offence to February the following year.
Throughout the ordeal, not a single witness backed the accuser, a man now in his mid-30s who also, sources close to the cardinal claim, reported another Melbourne priest for abuse. One senior legal figure, with no connections to the case, told Pell he had never heard of such a trial proceeding without a single witness.
Because the renovations were incomplete by the end of 1996, Pell did not use the relatively private Archbishop’s sacristy. He was in the busy priests’ sacristy, with priests, altar servers and others coming and going.
It is extremely unfortunate, some of Pell’s friends believe, that the two juries hearing the case were taken around the cathedral on a quiet weekday when it is usually all but deserted, rather than having the chance to see its hustle and bustle on Sunday mornings.
Four witnesses, appearing for the prosecution, testified that Pell was never alone in the sacristy, the door of which was open. The witnesses were Monsignor Charles Portelli, who was the Archbishop’s Master of Ceremonies and the former Cathedral sacristan Max Potter and two former servers.
In May last year, during the Committal hearing, Magistrate Belinda Wallington, who sent the Cardinal to trial over the Cathedral charges noted that “If a jury accepted the evidence of Monsignor Portelli and Mr Potter that the archbishop was never in the sacristy robed and alone, and that choirboys could never access the sacristy keys because they were always locked when unused, then a jury could not convict.’’
The fifth charge was even more bizarre. It claimed that more a month after the initial incident, again after Mass as the liturgical procession was returning to the sacristy area, Pell lurched across to the complainant and briefly grabbed the complainant’s genitals through the complainant’s robes. Not a single witness corroborated that allegation, either, although such behaviour would have been seen by dozens of people and provoked uproar.
According to the evidence, Pell was fully vested when he committed the crimes of which he was found guilty. Over his trousers and shirt, he wore an alb — a long, straight white garment, extending from shoulder to the floor, with no openings and no splits at the front or sides that would have allowed the garment to be moved aside, as alleged. Over the alb, Pell wore a cincture — a thick cord tied several times around his waist, and over that a heavy chasuble (the outer robe). Those garments, worn by every priest at Mass, have spiritual significance. The choir boys were also vested in robes over their shirts and trousers.
The timing was odd for another reason. The scandal of clerical abuse was a major issue in the news in late 1996 in Melbourne after the inglorious legacy of Pell’s predecessor, Archbishop Frank Little. Pell had launched the Melbourne Response in October 1996, a system to deal with the problem led by an independent QC and the first of its kind for the Catholic Church in the world. In that atmosphere, the notion of Pell committing grotesque offences in a semipublic place with an open door (a point not disputed by the prosecution) at a busy time defies logic.
During the committal hearing, Ms Wallington dismissed even more grotesque charges against Pell, dating back decades before 1996 to provincial Victoria. As Richter said in his summing up in the Committal hearing, one charge that was subsequently dismissed owed “more to the watching of Satanist movies’’.
It was extreme, violent and satanic, lending weight to the view that Pell has been the victim of a vile stitch up. If so, it needs to be uncovered. In the committal hearing, Richter said had the police made proper investigations (as the defence did) they would have discovered no evidence that Pell was never at the institution where the alleged Satanic incident occurred.
Questions also need to be asked about why Victoria Police, set up a “get Pell’’ Operation Tethering in March 2013 — a year before he was appointed Vatican Treasurer. At the time the operation started no complaints had been made against the Cardinal.
However grim things look for Pell today, this saga has a long way to unravel yet.
Tess Livingstone
The Australian
March 1, 2019
While Cardinal George Pell is under lock and key, awaiting sentencing for guilty verdicts on five serious child sexual abuse charges, ongoing unease in some quarters about the soundness of those verdicts makes them worthy of scrutiny.
Only two options present themselves — first, that Pell is a sacrilegious hypocrite, with the agility of Houdini; or second, that an alarming miscarriage of justice has played out at the hands of the Victorian justice system. There can be no middle ground. The saga now shifts to the Victorian Court of Appeal.
The guilty verdict was delivered in December by a unanimous jury, in a properly constituted court, after an earlier jury was dismissed on September 20 because it split 10-2 in Pell’s favour. Hence the second trial, in which many people, whether they like or loathe Pell and all he stands for, believe went badly wrong.
If so, the jury were not the only ones to get it wrong, nor the most culpable. Hard questions need to be asked about police and judicial processes, including how and why certain allegations ever made it to court, let alone to trial.
During the first trial, observers in the gallery claimed: “Even if he didn’t do it he deserves to be punished. He was in charge of the whole show’’. How much did such sentiments influence the verdicts, if at all? Australian justice cannot sink so low.
Studied closely, the five convictions of child sexual abuse are grotesque, implausible and break the bounds of credulity. In religious terms, they would be grave sacrileges.
Four offences purportedly took place over a six minute period in the sacristy (robing room) of the cathedral in late 1996, against two 13 year-old boys, immediately after the Sunday Solemn Mass. The fifth supposedly took place at around the same time of day, also on a Sunday Mass, in the cathedral corridors about a month later, against one boy.
The logistics were incredible. When Pell became archbishop of Melbourne in August 1996, St Patrick’s was closed for renovations, leaving only two dates on which he celebrated Sunday Mass at the Cathedral — December 15 and December 22nd. Yet the charges, initially at least, related to incidents in 1996, allegedly “a month apart”.
Pell’s counsel, Robert Richter QC raised the issue of timing at the opening of the second trial, noting that the police investigation failed to establish proper dates and that after the defence did so, the prosecution changed the date of the fifth alleged offence to February the following year.
Throughout the ordeal, not a single witness backed the accuser, a man now in his mid-30s who also, sources close to the cardinal claim, reported another Melbourne priest for abuse. One senior legal figure, with no connections to the case, told Pell he had never heard of such a trial proceeding without a single witness.
Because the renovations were incomplete by the end of 1996, Pell did not use the relatively private Archbishop’s sacristy. He was in the busy priests’ sacristy, with priests, altar servers and others coming and going.
It is extremely unfortunate, some of Pell’s friends believe, that the two juries hearing the case were taken around the cathedral on a quiet weekday when it is usually all but deserted, rather than having the chance to see its hustle and bustle on Sunday mornings.
Four witnesses, appearing for the prosecution, testified that Pell was never alone in the sacristy, the door of which was open. The witnesses were Monsignor Charles Portelli, who was the Archbishop’s Master of Ceremonies and the former Cathedral sacristan Max Potter and two former servers.
In May last year, during the Committal hearing, Magistrate Belinda Wallington, who sent the Cardinal to trial over the Cathedral charges noted that “If a jury accepted the evidence of Monsignor Portelli and Mr Potter that the archbishop was never in the sacristy robed and alone, and that choirboys could never access the sacristy keys because they were always locked when unused, then a jury could not convict.’’
The fifth charge was even more bizarre. It claimed that more a month after the initial incident, again after Mass as the liturgical procession was returning to the sacristy area, Pell lurched across to the complainant and briefly grabbed the complainant’s genitals through the complainant’s robes. Not a single witness corroborated that allegation, either, although such behaviour would have been seen by dozens of people and provoked uproar.
According to the evidence, Pell was fully vested when he committed the crimes of which he was found guilty. Over his trousers and shirt, he wore an alb — a long, straight white garment, extending from shoulder to the floor, with no openings and no splits at the front or sides that would have allowed the garment to be moved aside, as alleged. Over the alb, Pell wore a cincture — a thick cord tied several times around his waist, and over that a heavy chasuble (the outer robe). Those garments, worn by every priest at Mass, have spiritual significance. The choir boys were also vested in robes over their shirts and trousers.
The timing was odd for another reason. The scandal of clerical abuse was a major issue in the news in late 1996 in Melbourne after the inglorious legacy of Pell’s predecessor, Archbishop Frank Little. Pell had launched the Melbourne Response in October 1996, a system to deal with the problem led by an independent QC and the first of its kind for the Catholic Church in the world. In that atmosphere, the notion of Pell committing grotesque offences in a semipublic place with an open door (a point not disputed by the prosecution) at a busy time defies logic.
During the committal hearing, Ms Wallington dismissed even more grotesque charges against Pell, dating back decades before 1996 to provincial Victoria. As Richter said in his summing up in the Committal hearing, one charge that was subsequently dismissed owed “more to the watching of Satanist movies’’.
It was extreme, violent and satanic, lending weight to the view that Pell has been the victim of a vile stitch up. If so, it needs to be uncovered. In the committal hearing, Richter said had the police made proper investigations (as the defence did) they would have discovered no evidence that Pell was never at the institution where the alleged Satanic incident occurred.
Questions also need to be asked about why Victoria Police, set up a “get Pell’’ Operation Tethering in March 2013 — a year before he was appointed Vatican Treasurer. At the time the operation started no complaints had been made against the Cardinal.
However grim things look for Pell today, this saga has a long way to unravel yet.
Wow, The Australian going into bat for a conservative man in a powerful position.
I've never seen the likes of that before.
Evidence heard, verdict delivered, much wailing by so many who have not heard the evidence. Don't see this when it's just some average Joe being convicted.
DS
I've never seen the likes of that before.
Evidence heard, verdict delivered, much wailing by so many who have not heard the evidence. Don't see this when it's just some average Joe being convicted.
DS
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easy_tiger
Guest
LeeToRainesToRoach said:
Um, theres a 3rd option Tess.
And its factual
3. That Cardinal Pell is a convicted pedophile who raped child in the mouth.
Its a slightly more serious offence than sacriligeous hypocrite, but the sentance can be served concurrently, so
Hows that?
I think your job application for Miranda's position didnt go so well.
But you are right theres plenty still to play out for George.
Pretty much everyone in jail either got raped by a priest, or knew someone who did.
And they serve neopolitan icecream on Sundays.
We'll call you
DavidSSS said:
Reckon a couple of Peter Dupas' convictions were railroaded through to tie up loose ends. You can take up the cudgels on that one.
tigersnake said:
Richter the inflictor’s best days are behind him.
He also said he’d never do kiddy fiddler cases.
Pell chose poorly.
But, jeez, dangerous verdict IMO. (With obvious caveat that no-one knows the evidence of the complainant.)
