MARCH 1, 2019

St. John Paul II Is More Relevant Than Ever

JOHN HITTINGER

Crisis Magazine

An informative, comprehensive, well-written, and persuasive book, The Splendor of Marriage was published by Angelico Press to mark the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968). In a culminating chapter, Richard Spinello lays out the argument of Humanae Vitae and makes it clear why the document is so central to Catholic doctrine and life. This analysis is bolstered by a thorough account of St. John Paul II’s defense and elaboration of its central concepts and arguments. Through a well-developed Thomistic personalism, Pope John Paul II wrote some powerful and insightful accounts of love, marriage, and family. From his early treatise on Love and Responsibility, to various essays on love, marriage, and ethics, as well as his Person and Act, Cardinal Wojtyła used philosophical reason and phenomenology to clarify and defend the truth about the human good, particularly as it pertains to marriage and family. As pope he wrote various encyclicals and exhortations such as Familiaris Consortio, Letter to Families, Gospel of Life, Splendor of Truth, and his sustained meditations on human sexuality and marriage (now compiled and called Theology of the Body).

Drawing upon many resources to make his case—literary, theological, philosophic, and phenomenological—John Paul II is rightly praised by his successor Pope Benedict as offering “a way of thinking in dialogue with the concrete, founded on the great tradition, but always in search of confirmation in present reality. It is a form of thought that springs from an artist’s gaze and, at the same time, it is guided by a pastor’s care…. This comprehension of man beginning not from abstractions and theoretical principles, but seeking to grasp his reality with love, was—and remains—decisive for the pope’s thought” (My Beloved Predecessor, pp. 8-9). Thus, Pope John Paul II must be credited with raising out of Humanae Vitae an exquisitely articulated and argued account of Catholic doctrine on marriage which displays the beauty and explains the rightness and goodness of a life lived out of profound respect for the gift of fertility. Those enemies of the Church without and the legion of dissenters within must continue to resort to caricature and reduction of Humanae Vitae to its prohibition of artificial contraception and to ignore its ample defense made by John Paul II.

Spinello’s book, The Splendor of Marriage, brings our attention back to the great achievement of Saint John Paul II. This is all the more needed in the Church given the ambiguities and dubia surrounding the doctrine as of late. It was curious and disturbing to hear that in 2016 our present pontiff attempted to rehabilitate the most bitter dissenter who frequently attacked St. John Paul II, namely, Bernard Haring. Haring was a mentor and inspiration to Charles Curran. Indeed, Catholic moral theology needed renewal after the Council but Haring and John Paul II traveled different paths. Which one was the true path? This book makes the answer abundantly clear.

Spinello, who has written previous books on John Paul II, has attained a masterful command of the textual sources and he discusses various milestones in the life of John Paul II in order to illuminate his rich teaching and witness to life. The book contains ten chapters. The first two set the context by explaining why this pope was indeed “The Pope of the Family” and by sketching the many political, ideological, and moral threats posed to the integrity of marriage and family in our day. John Paul II wanted to be known as the pope of the family.  In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he wrote: “As a young priest I learned to love human love. … If one loves human love, there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the service of ‘fair love,’ because love is fair; it is beautiful. After all, young people are always searching for the beauty in love.” Many young people followed him throughout their lives, forming a group called “Środowisko,” the importance of which one may gather from Weigel’s biographies.

Spinello devotes a chapter at the end of the book to John Paul II’s writings on the family, especially his Familiaris Consortio (1981) and Letter to Families (1994). “The family is the first and most important path” for a person walking “a path from which man cannot withdraw.” The vocation to motherhood and fatherhood is realized in the family. It is the heart of education of the young, a community of service, founded on the law of free giving, and a domestic church. The current of the civilization of love passes through the family. It is no wonder that Pope John Paul II devoted so much effort and care to nurturing family life and defending it against the efforts to redefine it, subvert it, and limit its influence.

Church Teaching in Light of the Current Crisis
The present crisis in the Catholic Church is marked by so many problems it is difficult to know where to begin or find the unifying theme and subsequently how to find a coherent and effective solution. Richard Spinello correctly assesses the crisis and the path towards a solution in terms of the clash between the culture of life and the culture of death, as it swirls around the life of love, marriage, and the family. He cites the remarks of Sr. Lucia: “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue” (1981). Five years earlier when he was a cardinal visiting various locations in the United States—Orchard Lake, Michigan, among them—he said:

We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel and the anti-Gospel…. It is a trial of not only our nation and Church, but in a sense a test of two thousand years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, human rights, and the rights of nations. As the number of people who understand the importance of this confrontation increase in Poland and America, we can look with greater trust towards the outcome of this confrontation. The Church has gone through many trials, as has the Polish nation, and has emerged victorious even though at a cost of great sacrifice.

In his Letter to Families, he stated that “the family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love” (LF §23). Precisely to keep the vision of John Paul II alive and to equip the faithful to meet the challenge of the day, Spinello offers this book. “Those who dare to enter onto the battlefield will need weapons. And some of the most potent weapons are the refined writings of St. John Paul II.”

The problem, according to Spinello, must be traced to the crisis of truth: the abandonment of the full truth about man and God. The terms love, freedom, marriage, and even person no longer convey their essential meanings and have been redefined through a secularist and historicist ideology. Such ideologies reject the natural order and refuse to affirm the created universe as a gift to be gratefully accepted and cultivated by the human person. Thus many people are now convinced that human sexuality does not have any intrinsic relationship to procreation, or to sexual differentiation and complementarity. The proponents of the “new green deal” question whether children should be brought into a world they see as polluted. More disturbing yet are those in the Church who “go along with this secular morality, to breezily exchange relevance for truth.” They fail to defend the whole truth, labeling it as an “ideal” that may conveniently be cast aside.

I would suggest that Spinello’s book be read in conjunction with Philip Lawler’s The Smoke of Satan. Lawler shows how the crisis of today has been brewing for decades—particularly through the habits of denial of the failures to live chastely and the specific refusal to teach and support Humanae Vitae. Lawler remarks that he has not once heard a homily on Humanae Vitae. I have heard more than one such homily, many by priests in various lay movements, but also in a parish setting by the late Fr. Bill Carmody of Corpus Christi Parish in Colorado Springs, Colorado. But I have also heard Humanae Vitae mocked numerous times by the clergy. At our Cana Weekend for marriage preparation over 35 years ago, a priest responded to my question about Humanae Vitae as follows: “If you are hung up on the authority bit, then go follow it, but the rest of you just follow your conscience.”

The Defense of Humanae Vitae
The principles for a proper understanding and defense of Humanae Vitae are laid out in three chapters on personhood and freedom, the personalistic norm, and the manifold and essential characteristics of true love. These philosophical principles are intricately connected and they are available to thought through a reflection upon human experience. The reader must work through the arguments as Spinello lays out seven key themes for our reflection and study. I will just briefly mention some of them. In the chapter on personhood he explains the notions of nature and person and balances the aspects of freedom and truth in personal existence. As John Paul II once said that the root error of socialism is anthropological, so too we could say that Western liberalism has a faulty anthropology in its exaltation of personal freedom and its subsequent ideas of personal self-sufficiency and the measure of utility through satisfaction of the manifold appetites of persons. It neglects or denies the truth of the good; it neglects or denies the communion of persons through gift.

Freedom and responsibility find their fulfillment in love. Sexuality must be understood in this context if it is to be human and the act of a person. Love is a relational dimension of personal existence. The differentiation and complementarity of male and female are signs of the gift character of personal existence and its fulfillment in spousal love. The importunities of concupiscence and the habits of life that follow from yielding to the selfish use of others typically blind the human person to the true characteristics of love and the demands it makes upon us. It is difficult to rise to the honesty of George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin.” The personalistic norm, that one not use the other as a means to selfish satisfaction, shines forth as a bright line. Mutual affirmation of the person and mutual recognition of a vocation to motherhood and fatherhood are the spirit of that norm when it comes to sexual activity.

Spinello follows Wojtyła, in his Love and Responsibility, in tracing out the many aspects of love such as fondness and attraction, desire, reciprocity, sympathy, and friendship to arrive at the spousal gift of love by which is established the communion of persons called marriage. Such a communion of persons is a covenant—more than a contract because of this total and mutual self-giving. Marriage is a promise for a permanent and perpetually binding commitment and is characterized by the properties of unity, fidelity, and fruitfulness. The identity and vocation of spouses to be mother and father are essential to this relationship and this bond.  Spinello summarizes these three key chapters on foundational principles as follows:

We have shown that interpersonal self-giving and receiving is the natural way of life for the human person, who can achieve fulfillment only in union or solidarity with others. Therefore, “man and woman were created for marriage,” because every person has a vocation to spousal love, and marriage is the primary way of living out that vocation. We have also uncovered the unique character of spousal love, this mutual belonging or personal communion, which is created by the free and total bodily gift itself. That total self-gift is not present in other forms of love, such as friendship or parental love. Sexual relations are appropriate only for spousal love, where sexual union is the sign and means of this authentic union of persons. (82)

These chapters are followed by one on chastity, to which I shall return, and then chapters on the sacramental dimension of marriage and the encyclical Humanae Vitae. The encyclical simply defends the long-standing tradition of the Church and, of course, most societies; marriage has a fundamental procreative purpose which should not be subverted. Spinello notes that there was a great confidence in science and technology that inclined people to believe that life from birth could be controlled by medical techniques. And with the rise of new theologies—forms of existentialism and proportionalism—dissenters found a ready audience throughout Western liberal societies. Pope Paul VI took a prophetic stand—for now we see how this technology has not provided a magic bullet but has brought much abuse and disorder into personal lives, families, and society as a whole. And the new theologies have been overcome by the true renewal that has arisen through Vatican II; John Paul II drew upon these sources of renewal to make his case in defense of Pope Paul VI, his mentor.

In this chapter, Spinello again shows his mastery of the many rich sources to reveal the mind of Pope John Paul II. His essay on the anthropological vision and particularly his defense of Humanae Vitae in Theology of the Body provide a superb explanation of the teaching. He gives a more vigorous and reasoned account of these aspects of Catholic teaching that needed to be restated and defended in light of modern culture and other modern developments. The Church’s teaching on marriage, family, and family planning are particularly important points where this holds to be the case. And in the Wednesday audience talks on the encyclical he is particularly good in showing how the teaching of Vatican II, especially Gaudium et Spes, fully supports the teaching of Pope Paul VI. The hermeneutic of continuity is in full display in his careful examination of the texts.

Reasserting the Importance of Chastity
I would like to conclude this review by returning to the chapter on chastity. The dearth of chastity has much to do with the crisis of our time. As our cultural elite now shames and pillories those men who have taken advantage of others, the need for chastity never seems to occur to them as the only way to overcome such abuse. And so, too, the crisis in the Church that is now unfolding. I’ve heard firsthand accounts that there are certain religious orders that teach their novices and seminarians that celibacy simply means that the clergy do not get married and that it doesn’t require strict continence. This means they can rationalize and tolerate homosexual activity in the seminaries and in the priesthood. If continence is not seen to be obligatory, all the more does the virtue of chastity become absurd to a significant number of religious and laity. But how can there be any response to a universal call to holiness if there is a near universal mockery of chastity or at least the neglect of chastity?

Spinello once again shows the tremendous work done by John Paul II on the role of chastity in living a life of integrity in marriage and family. Chastity is the virtue that enables us to effectively deal with concupiscence and the disorder of desire. This virtue needs to be rehabilitated and its proper meaning restored. Chastity is not just about moderation or self-control but it is an inner attitude of respect for the other, an attitude of apprehending the beauty of the embodied person. John Paul II said that chastity is “a transparency of interiority without which love cannot be itself.” The essence of chastity is “the habitual readiness to affirm the value of the person in every context and to elevate the personal above all sensual or affective reactions.” The personalistic norm and the virtue of chastity save us from the depersonalization of sexuality and offer the only safeguard from the flood of sexual abuse and exploitation.

Josef Pieper, in Four Cardinal Virtues, explains the significance of temperance and chastity. The natural urge to sensual enjoyment, manifested in delight in food and drink and sexual pleasure, is “the echo and mirror of man’s strongest natural forces of self-preservation (self and species).” Further, he says that “these forces are closely allied to the deepest human urge towards being, they exceed all other powers of mankind in their destructive violence once they degenerate into selfishness.” So even if temperance be the “least of the virtues,” the so-called sins below the belt should by no means be dismissed as of no account. Pieper explains that “temperance extends its ordering mastery down to the fountainhead from which the figure of moral man springs up.” Wojtyla wrote that there is a “distinct possibility about the failure to integrate love” and so temperance and chastity are necessary for a life lived according to the loving kindness that rejects using others and affirms the beauty of the other. Chastity in our day is indeed a heroic virtue, not because of the difficulty of chastity as if it were a stoic resolve to be joyless, but because of the magnanimous heart of love whose joy is true.

The great Dominican Lacordaire (1802-1861) in Catholicism and Chastity proclaimed that chastity is the “ground on which the world and the gospel never meet an accord and harmony, they must always remain as poles asunder.” The philosophers and men of the world are powerless to overcome concupiscence. The triumph of the Church, he says, comes from the chastity that it alone can produce, and particularly it needs the chastity of the priest. For he says “the heart remains ardent, like fire, by charity but firm, like granite, by chastity.” He wisely notes that the Catholic people will forgive the priest many faults as long as the sign of chastity remains upon his brow. He asserts that “the priesthood and chastity will ever be one and the same dignity, one and the same expression of the God Who saved the world upon the cross.”

In the nineteenth century, Lacordaire could exclaim that through twenty centuries the priesthood had undergone a trial but despite isolated scandals had remained safe and secure. Thus for good reason many have urged that the pontiff place the issue of active homosexuality in the priesthood on the agenda to solve the abuse crisis. Sins against chastity must not be dismissed as mere sins below the belt whose significance is inconsequential. For on this virtue stands the Catholic teaching on marriage and family, on it stands the honor and respect for the priesthood, and on it stands a bright witness in a world marked by deep despair and disgust of the human condition and hearts shriveled by the lack of a magnanimous love.

We are in great debt to Professor Spinello for clearly explaining the essentials of the Catholic teaching on love, marriage, and family and for highlighting the special contribution that the many gifts of John Paul II brought to the Church and the world in his own celebration and defense of the family. John Paul II is indeed the pope of the family. For this reason, Spinello’s book offers many needed answers to the crisis in the Church and in our world today.

(Photo credit: CNA / L’Osservatore Romano)

Tagged as Humanae Vitae, Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, Josef Pieper, Pope John Paul II, Richard Spinello, The Splendor of Marriage (2018)175

By John Hittinger

John Hittinger is a professor in the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St Thomas, Houston and the author of Liberty, Wisdom and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory. He is the founder and director of the Pope John Paul II Forum for the Church in the Modern World and president of the International Catholic University, founded by Ralph McInerny (1929-2010), the co-founder of Crisis Magazine. He is also developing a MA in John Paul II studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

SENATE DEMOCRATS VOTE DOWN INFANTICIDE BILL

NEWS:US NEWS

by Christine Niles, M.St. (Oxon.), J.D.  •  ChurchMilitant.com  •  February 25, 2019    162 Comments

All six Democrat presidential hopefuls voted against the measure

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WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) – Senate Democrats voted 53-44 against a measure that would have provided medical care to babies born alive after botched abortions.

The Senate vote for the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act took place Monday, and failed to meet the minimum 60 votes to overcome the filibuster.

Not all Democrats voted against the bill. Three Democrats — Doug Jones (Ala.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Bob Casey, Jr. (Pa.) — joined Republicans in voting to pass the pro-life measure. Republican Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) abstained from voting. Republican Senators Tim Scott and Kevin Cramer would have voted in support of it but were unable to be present.Repulsive. Tell me more about how our children are threatened by climate change while voting not to protect children born alive, Senators.Tweet

Reaction to the failed measure was swift. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted, “Repulsive. Tell me more about how our children are threatened by climate change while voting not to protect children born alive, Senators.”

Catholic writer Matt Walsh called the Democratic Party “evil beyond words.”

Ryan Saavedra of The Daily Wire noted that every Democrat running for president next year voted against the measure.

Lila Rose of Live Action also tweeted the names of Democrat presidential hopefuls.

Father Frank Pavone, executive director of Priests for Life, made clear this would be an election day issue.

Benjamin Weingarten of The Federalist called it an “abomination.”

In comments shortly after the vote, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) said the vote “made it crystal clear” that Democrats “support the legalization of infanticide … .”

Republican Sen. Ben Sasse (Neb.) introduced the bill in the wake of New York’s abortion law passed last month, the most radical abortion measure in the history of the country, which would allow killing of an unborn child for practically any reason up to the moment of birth — and even after birth, if it’s the result of a botched abortion.

“What this bill does is try to secure basic rights, equal rights, for babies that are born and survive outside the womb,” Sassie said on the Senate floor before voting took place.

“I urge my colleagues to picture a baby that’s already been born, that’s outside the womb gasping for air,” Sasse said. “That’s the only thing that today’s vote is actually about. We’re talking about babies that have already been born.”

Democrats argued that the new bill would restrict doctors’ options on how to handle babies with serious medical conditions, arguing that the 2002 Born Alive Infants Protection Act already provides basic protections against infanticide. Sasse’s bill would have built on the 2002 law, clarifying what steps doctors must take to save such babies, including immediately sending them to the hospital.

CATHOLIC LEAGUE FOR RELIGIOUS AND CIVIL RIGHTS

Cardinal Pell’s Appeal Is Justified February 26, 2019Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the conviction of Cardinal George Pell:   Australian Cardinal George Pell was convicted in December of molesting two choirboys in the 1990s, but it was not until yesterday that the details were disclosed; charges against Pell that would require a second trial over other allegations were dropped. Pell’s lawyers are appealing the conviction.   There are many holes in the story that led to Pell’s conviction. To begin with, one of the boys who was alleged to have registered a complaint overdosed on drugs and died. More important, the boy’s mother said her son admitted, on two occasions, that Pell never abused him. This does not matter to the boy’s father: He says he is going to sue the Church or Pell once the appeal is resolved. Let him. And let him sue his wife for libeling their son.   Regarding the other boy, the sole complainant, he said that Pell made him perform oral sex on him after saying Mass at Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral two decades ago. I have already written extensively about this, so I will not repeat it here.   However, I will offer a good summary of what this one boy alleges to have happened. The quoted parts are taken from a well-researched news story published today by Rod McGuirk of the Associated Press; he writes from Melbourne.   “The jury convicted Pell of abusing two boys whom he had caught swigging sacramental wine in a rear room of Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in late 1996, as hundreds of worshippers were streaming out of Sunday services.   “[Robert] Richter, his lawyer, had told the jury that only a ‘mad man’ would take the risk of abusing boys in such a public place. He said it was ‘laughable’ that Pell would have been able to expose his penis and force the victim to take it in his mouth, given the cumbersome robes he was wearing.   “The jury was handed the actual cumbersome robes Pell wore as archbishop. Over his regular clothes, Pell would wear a full-length white robe called an alb that was tied around his waist with a rope-like cincture. Over that, he would drape a 3-meter (10-foot) band of cloth called a stole around his neck. The outermost garment was the long poncho-like chasuble.   “More than 20 witnesses, including clerics, choristers and altar servers, testified during the trial. None recalled ever seeing the complainant and the other victim break from a procession of choristers, altar servers and clerics to go to the back room.   “The complainant testified that he and his friend had run from the procession and back into the cathedral through a side door to, as [Mark] Gibson, the prosecutor, said, ‘have some fun.’   “Monsignor Charles Portelli, who was the cathedral’s master of ceremonies in the 1990s, testified that he was always with Pell after Mass to help him disrobe in the sacristy.” He maintains the charges are totally false.   In other words, one of the alleged victims says he was never a victim, and the other can find no one—not one among over 20 who were with him that day—to support his story.   Keep Cardinal George Pell in your prayers. It is not easy for any priest, never mind a high-ranking one, to get a fair trial today. The hysteria and the animus that exist makes for a toxic environment.

Eccles and Bosco is saved

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Eccles and Bosco is saved

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The case against Cardinal Pell Posted: 01 Mar 2019 05:20 AM PST We are delighted to include an exclusive interview with Billy Bong, one of the jury who recently convicted Cardinal Pell of sex offences. Eccles: Now, Billy, how did you get to be on the jury?  Billy Bong.Billy: Well, I answered an advert, which said “Jury members wanted for high-profile trial. The successful candidates will have an IQ of 80 or less, be virulently anti-Catholic (if possible, freemasons), and to have had their consciences surgically removed.” Unfortunately, I had already missed out on an earlier advert.  Eccles: What was the earlier advert? Billy: “Story-writing competition. Make up a tale involving Cardinal Pell committing sex abuse. 200 dollars paid for the best fantasy.”  Eccles: I see. Now, the original trial resulted in a hung verdict, 10-2 in favour of Pell. Why did things swing round so far for the second trial? Billy: Well, we knew he must have done something, even if we weren’t sure of the details. Think how many comedians use “Catholic = child abuse” as a very very funny joke, even better than the old racial jokes about aboriginals and sheep that we used to love. So what could we do but find him guilty? A sign of bad character: Cardinal Pell argues with the umpire. Eccles; What about the evidence that he was actually outside the cathedral chatting to the congregation at the time he was supposed to be in the sacristy? Billy: Look, Catholics believe in miracles, don’t they? So it must have been possible.  Eccles: And exposing himself while wearing alb, stole, chasuble, etc. over his trousers? Billy: This was the prosecution’s point entirely. Under his clothes he was completely naked!  Eccles: And the witness not being cross-examined? Billy: They didn’t want to upset him by pointing out that he was either a liar or a lunatic. (They’d had so much trouble with other witness, a junkie who kept changing his mind.) Inspector Plod of the anti-Catholic Task Force (“Flying Plod of the Yard”) went to great trouble to write his testimony in green ink, and he didn’t want to rewrite it.  Eccles: How about “Thou shalt not bear false witness”? Billy: Oh yes, oh yes. They warned us that the Catholics would try to confuse things by digging up out-of-date theological arguments. Aaaarggh!!! Can we stop now??? My brain is giving off steam!!!  Eccles: Mr Bong, thank you very much.  Picnic at Hanging Rock. Police claim that Cardinal Pell abducted these girls in 1900.

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SPECIAL EDITORIAL  Has Cardinal George Pell been wrongly convicted?  by Patrick J. Byrne News Weekly, March 9, 2019 Cardinal George Pell, one of the highest prelates of the Catholic Church, has been convicted by a jury of child sexual abuse, and is awaiting sentencing.His defence lawyers have announced an appeal.Leading commentators and lawyers have questioned the conviction.Andrew Bolt is a leading Australian commentator on Sky News. He describes himself as an agnostic who says he has met Cardinal Pell on about five occasions. Bolt pointed to how the conviction did not match the evidence.Cardinal Pell was said to have found two choirboys in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, East Melbourne, drinking altar wine just after Mass. However, evidence presented showed that the wine was locked away and that the choirboys did not have access to the room.Cardinal Pell was said to have molested both boys whilst fully vested. The evidence was that the vestments could not be parted to allow for the alleged offences to occur.The attack was supposed to have happened straight after a crowded Sunday Mass, when Cardinal Pell’s custom was to speak to worshipers outside the Cathedral.The attack is alleged to have happened in the sacristy, a busy place where Cardinal Pell would have known that people would almost certainly walk into the room.The boys had allegedly slipped away from the choir procession after Mass to enter the sacristy, but none of the other choristers who gave evidence noticed them either leaving or rejoining the procession.Cardinal Pell was normally accompanied during and after Mass by the master of ceremonies (Monsignor Charles Portelli), who testified that he escorted the then Archbishop from the moment he arrived at the Cathedral to the moment he left. Monsignor Portelli declared the assault was impossible.Not a single witness, from what was a busy cathedral at the time of the alleged abuse, noticed anything untoward during the estimated 10 minutes of the alleged attack.There is no history or pattern of similar abuse by Cardinal Pell, unlike the typical pattern of paedophiles. Cardinal Pell was 55 at the time.Others express concernsPeter Westmore – former president of the National Civic Council, publisher and regular contributor to the NCC’s News Weekly – attended all public hearings of the two trials of Cardinal Pell. He was interviewed on Andrew Bolt’s Sky News program, The Bolt Report, and on American EWTN television.Having twice heard the evidence of 25 people brought as witnesses by the Prosecution, Mr Westmore said that not one corroborated the statements of the complainant. He said he was shocked by the guilty verdict and concluded that the “well of public opinion” had been so poisoned that it was not possible for the Cardinal to get a fair trial.“Coincidentally, two days after Cardinal Pell was convicted on December 11, 2018, Victoria’s attorney-general announced that the State Government was considering the option of judge-only trials of highly prominent people,” Mr Westmore said.John Silvester, a Walkley-award winning investigative crime writer and columnist with The Age newspaper, expressed his concerns about the conviction in his article “Beyond reasonable doubt: Was Pell convicted without fear and favour?” Silvesterwrote: “Pell was found guilty beyond reasonable doubt on the uncorroborated evidence of one witness, without forensic evidence, a pattern of behaviour or a confession. It is a matter of public record that it is rare to run a case on the word of one witness, let alone gain a conviction.”Jesuit priest and lawyer Fr Frank Brennan wrote in Eureka Street: “There are some who would convict him of all manner of things in the court of public opinion no matter what the evidence. There are others who would never convict him of anything, holding him in the highest regard. The criminal justice system is intended to withstand these preconceptions. The system is under serious strain, however, when it comes to Cardinal Pell.“The events of the Victorian parliamentary inquiry, the federal royal commission, the publication of Louise Milligan’s book, Cardinal, and Tim Minchin’s song, Come Home (Cardinal Pell), were followed, just two weeks before the trial commenced, by the parliamentary apology to the victims of child sexual abuse. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said: ‘Not just as a father, but as a Prime Minister, I am angry too at the calculating destruction of lives and the abuse of trust, including those who have abused the shield of faith and religion to hide their crimes, a shield that is supposed to protect the innocent, not the guilty. They stand condemned … on behalf of the Australian people, this Parliament and our government … I simply say I believe you, we believe you, your country believes you.’”“Such things tend to shift not the legal, but the reputational, burden upon an accused person to prove innocence rather than the prosecution to prove guilt,” Fr Brennan wrote.Sentencing hearingAt the sentencing hearing on Wednesday, February 28, Cardinal Pell’s legal counsel put to the trial judge that the alleged offending was at the lower end of the scale, describing it as a “plain vanilla sexual penetration case”. This comment was in the context of the sentence hearing, arguing that the Cardinal’s conviction should receive a lighter rather than a lengthier sentence.It is expected that Cardinal Pell’s appeal will be lodged after the judge hands down his sentence on March 13.

The Pell Case: What It Says, Where It’s Going
2nd March 2019

The Pell Case: What It Says, Where It’s Going – Quadrant Online

Paul Collits
AND so it all begins, again.  For those of us, and not only Catholics, who enjoyed the blissful, court-ordered respite from wall-to-wall Pell bashing while the in-camera trials were underway, alas that party is well and truly over.The day his conviction was announced when most of Cardinal Pell’s many (mainly silent) supporters and others for whom the public “witchhunt”, as Peter Wales dubbed at Quadrant Online, has seemed so appalling, might normally have been celebrating the fact that he is now in the clear on the charges in relation to the Ballarat matters.  Instead, they are forced to witness the shock and horror reactions of the many in relation to his (to-be-contested) conviction in early December 2018 on five charges related to the Melbourne matters.Pell’s avoidance of facing the second wave of charges is no small thing.  About this, there will be the normal strategic silence of the secularist and Pell-hating commentariat.  In fact, so far there is little being said about this, amidst all the new excitement over the discovery (for most) that Pell was convicted in December in relation to the Melbourne matters.People will believe what they wish to believe in relation to any “he said/he said”, scenario.  Where there is no physical evidence and no direct witnesses, three key elements are in play: first, the tremendous difficulty for the accused in proving a negative; second, a general disposition to side with the accuser, especially if the charges allege repugnant conduct; and third, a heightened need to examine the credibility of the parties and the likelihood that the alleged events occurred.  More on this later.The following are, in my humble opinion, all true in relation to the Pell case and its surrounds:

• There is a coterie, nay a conga line, of Pell haters within and outside the Church, and they have been either actively seeking to destroy his career and reputation over many years. Many not actively involved in those endeavours  have been cheering from the sidelines.

• The recently concluded Royal Commission, whether this was intended or not, has been transformed into another platform for attacking the Catholic Church, an institution now popularly thought to be beyond the pale and “riddled” with sex abusers. This is in spite of the abundant evidence, noted by Wales and repeatedly argued by Gerard Henderson among others, that the sexual abuse of minors is a societal (see under step-fathers and mum’s myriad boyfriends) and an institutional problem (see under the Boys Scouts and just about every church and educational outfit going)

• The view is all but universal, in Australia and elsewhere where abuse has occurred, that “someone should pay”. This view strikes me as intensifying

• There is routine conflation of unrelated cases of alleged sexual abuse in what is now an atmosphere of contempt for all things Catholic, especially for its clergy. An appalling article in New Zealand’s Dominion Post not-so-subtly linking Pell with Bill ‘Knockout Drops’ Cosby is but one example

• Contemporary society and its media have an obsession with paedophilia, so much so that the many cases of sexual abuse within and outside the Church which are not paedophilia routinely get described as such

• Victoria Police is riddled with political agendas, incompetence and corruption. It is not to be trusted in relation to just about anything, as will likely become abundantly clear when revelations begin to emerge from the royal commission into VicPol’s habit of recruiting lawyers as informants against their own clients

• It was massively helpful to Pell’s many enemies in Rome that his earlier and effective peeling away of the layers of corruption in the Vatican’s financial governance were stymied and, further, that he was conveniently removed from the scene

• Most recent, and recently reported cases of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church are performed by homosexuals, but there is an almost pathological avoidance of acknowledging this in the media and beyond, lest the rampant homosexualist march be slowed down.

All this might be patently true.  But is it relevant to the capacity of a Pell jury to acquit him?  Did Pell get dudded because of all this?
We need to determine whether these elements of the context/backstory are germane to the specific outcome of the second Pell trial which produced the guilty verdict.  Did the immense pressures from outside the courtroom, in a society awash with anti-Catholicism, anti-clericalism, Pell witchhuntery and obsessions over sex abuse have any bearing on the capacity of “twelve good men persons and true” to reach a reliable verdict on one particular man’s guilt or innocence?  The problem is whether the degree to which the average person in the street has been unknowingly, by osmosis even, infected with the anti-Catholic virus, such that the  allegation of sex abuse equals an immediate assumption of guilt. Perhaps it is a variation on the currently popular #metoo-ism.
Was it possible, given the above, for this man, belonging to this Church, on these charges, to get a fair trial at this time?  And note that we are not just talking about whether the jury members might have been influenced by some particular thing they saw or heard or read about this case.  We are talking about across-the-board systemic infection.  It is a little like the question I raised in another Quadrant Online article about whether a practising Catholic can now rise to the top political job in Australia and keep it, in view of the surrounding casual cultural biases. 
It might be objected at this point that, well, the jury in the first (mis)trial has been widely reported as having deadlocked 10-2 in favour of Pell (editors note: other reports, all unconfirmed, frame the numbers differently; suffice to know no accord was achieved in the jury eoom).  You cannot therefore suggest that a second jury reaching a very different position shows that jurors will inevitably be incapable of reaching a pro-Pell decision.  If those reports of a 10-2 split to acquit are accurate, one very nearly did.
The circumstances of the abandonment of the first trial and the result of the second are certainly problematic, but I believe, for different reasons.
One way of unpacking these questions is to attempt to get inside the minds of the jurors who have convicted Pell, to the extent that we, who weren’t at the trial and who do not know the jurors, are able.  Looking at what the punters are saying is a useful place to start, and those who comment on the news and what is said about the news can be very revealing of the national pulse.
The brave article by Frank Brennan in The Australian and at Eureka Street has brought forth a useful range of views that may inform an understanding of what the punters think about the verdict.  Brennan saw much of the trial.  He found the case against Pell to be utterly unconvincing.  This view should be perceived in light of the widely known fact that Brennan is, on the one hand, no ideological friend of Pell’s and, on the other, utterly committed to justice for the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and prelates.  So the charge that “he is a Catholic – he would say that” is misplaced.
The responses to Brennan’s essay were not those of trolls and members of GetUp, but (generally) of a cross-section of the community and, therefore, a reasonable sampling of community views — the sort of views likely to be found among jurors.  Readers of Eureka Street themselves are not self-selecting Pell supporters, even if many are Catholic.
These are a sampling of the various views that emerge:

• Those who know of Pell often dislike him, but do not necessarily consider him likely to have done the things of which he is accused. However, that Pell did not give evidence at the trial suggests that personal views of him did not figure in any way among jurors

• There is a strong view that Catholics still don’t get it. We defend paedophiles, come what may.  We never believe the victim, we never sympathise

• Some, alarmingly, think as follows: a jury found him guilty – therefore he must have done it it. Simple as that

• Past and indeed recent efforts to sweep abuse under the carpet mean that this particular defendant is guilty of the charges against him

• Anyone seeking to defend Pell must be biased

• There was something dodgy about the accused not taking the stand

• The Church thinks it is above the law

• Trials of accused perpetrators provide an opportunity to punish all wrongdoers and compensate victims. (This is an irrelevant but very powerful, persistent and widespread view)

• Seeking justice for alleged perpetrators necessarily means lacking sympathy for victims of real cases of abuse

• It is “disturbing” that alleged victims are not believed (routinely)

• There is something fishy about the large number of abuse claims and the relative absence of perpetrators being brought to trial – and isn’t it great when one gets his comeupperance!

• Please own up and accept your punishment.

Some of these claims I find to be inflated, some misplaced, some true but irrelevant, many confused, and others quite ridiculous.  But they are what ordinary people think.  Hence they are both revealing and relevant here, when contemplating why a jury would seemingly ignore the powerful legal and evidentiary arguments placed before their eyes. 
Other claims reflect the impassioned cries of abuse survivors.  Their sentiments are powerful, but their views  sometimes simply reinforce the suspicion that, in matters of sexual abuse, logic and evidence simply fly out the window.  Here from Eureka Street, for example, is Carol:
As one of the few survivors who has a formal apology and a court settlement from a Catholic religious order, I find your article shocking. Up to now you have always respected the law process but now you question it. You were one of the good guys, my Church is now a darker place than before and I truly despair when enlightened leaders like yourself write articles like this one. All I can say is that God knows the truth and I pray that the Cardinal might one day speak it too.
Why is the Brennan article “shocking”?  I struggle to see it.  It seems simply to be #metoo-ism gone feral. One did it, therefore they all did it. 
There is also a simplistic faith in the jury system and the fact that “it works”.  Not always, as Lindy Chamberlain might attest.
Juries clearly are a lottery, given the astonishing and disturbing rebound from the reported 10-2 to 0-12 within a couple of months.  The very fickleness of outcomes, the fact that some jurisdictions allow majority verdicts while others do not, the fact that Victoria itself has been considering changing these things, and the ongoing debates over judge-alone versus jury trials, suggest that Pell, if not very, very hard done by in his two trials, was at best in the lap of gods (so to speak).  But these particular juries, whether or not they were open to bias through absorbing information about this case, have nevertheless been exposed over time to relentless, and insidious assaults on the Christian culture and its standard bearers. 
Whether one accepts the thesis of the Gramscian strategy driving Marxist enculturation through the institutions of society and seeking to destroy Christianity, it is the case that the post-Christian polity we have ended up with encompasses both non-belief among the masses and aggressive enmity towards the Church from the opinion leaders who shape much of what the punters end up believing.
Reader Margaret, also writing at Eureka Street, puts it succinctly:
Whatever the final outcome, there is obviously something horribly wrong with our justice system in this country. With the dumbed-down culture that prevails today, who ever would choose a jury?
The first jury, or at least a strong majority thereof, was seemingly able to set aside its conscious biases and its unconscious absorption of the zeitgeist, and almost reach a verdict that seemed to be in accordance with both the evidence and the judge’s instructions.
The responses to Brennan were not without humour, whether or not intended.  A priest sought to cast doubt on the defence’s line that it could not have happened due to the vestments worn by celebrants of Mass.  He argued that Pell might have excused himself to answer a call of nature, that he (the priest) had himself done this, and that all the vestments did NOT get in the way. 
Joel retorted:
With all respect Fr Leahy, and without going into further graphic detail, taking a whizz and doing what the Cardinal is accused of doing is quite a different thing. To say the least. Not to mention the fact that a half serious bishop, on top of the alb, cincture, stole and chasuble, also has a dalmatic and a pallium to contend with, and a buttoned up cassock. Only then one might get to the fly on the trousers and then the briefs. Most priests can barely manage to get to the switch on their lapel mic. Whole thing is preposterous.
Commenter Lee goes big, playing every card in the deck:
I have had enough of this culture of denial. These damaged victims have been through hell by the best lawyers in then land. Yet these sexual crimes are only the tip of the iceberg. Children over many decades have been subject to psychological abuse, and physical violence on a daily basis. Their parents have been threatened will  [sic] Hell if they did not obey their Parish Priests and any non-catholic parent has been excluded from their children education and spiritual upbringing. There has been no public acknowledgement of these evil abuses of power and no apology. Any we are expected to doubt the accusers. One Christian Brother at my school bashed shit out of us for most of a school year before putting the hard word on several of the boys. He disappeared overnight. As for the sanctify of confession, the Parish Priest in my wife’s home town used to tell the secrets of the confession to his friends at the local pub, while also keeping a defect [sic] wife. In short, the church as an institution has shown itself to be corrupt and should be shut down. Along the way the Vatican should lose its diplomatic status and its treasures handed to the Italian State.
Give it to “Lee”, who leaves no stone unturned in assembling every single anti-Catholic talking point one can think of.  Catholics are used to all this.  But it does reveal how jurors, at least some if not many, might think; indeed how they might frame their duty as jurors in this kind of case.
The many comments in response to Brennan are highly revealing.  There is, however, another crucial matter that may or may not have been known to the jurors, and its significance not realised by them.
The reported elements of the Pell trial(s) suggest that much of the disputed “evidence” related to whether the alleged incidents could have occurred, as much as whether they did occur.  Less discussed, certainly in the media, is whether this man, Pell, is likely to have done the things alleged.  Most acts of sexual abuse done by Catholic clerics are the predations of homosexuals.  The allegations in this case clearly relate to homosexual behaviour.
Second, most instances of sexual abuse in the case of minors reflect a clear methodology on the part of the perpetrator.  The process normally involves all of the following: secrecy, grooming, slow-but-steady tentative courtship, multiple precautions to ensure non-reporting by the abused and, chillingly, predatory calculated behaviour.
The legal academic Jeremy Gans, in discussing the direction and likely outcome of the coming appeal, has also canvassed the bizarreness of the suggested lack of predator method in the allegations against Pell: a semi-public place, crazily risky actions, no prior grooming, no preparation, no self-protection against subsequent reporting by the abused, not even any previous knowledge of the victim(s).
No one that I know, and no one that I know who knows Cardinal George Pell, would think either that he is homosexual, or that he is stupid, or that he is compulsive, or that he is rampantly a risk-taker.
No, if this occurred, it was behaviour that was homosexual, risky and brazen.  Not likely to have been perpetrated, then, by this man, in this way.
Others have canvassed the unlikelihood of someone who had led efforts, in brave and innovative ways, actually to end clerical abuse in his organisation, and to have perpetrators punished and victims compensated, himself being an abuser.  I will not re-canvass these here. 
I do not know whether the Pell legal team called any character references.  It might have been expected, this being a case where the lack of physical evidence or indeed any direct compelling evidence meant that the credibility/character of the accuser(s) and the accused came more sharply into focus. 
I do know that many in the Church, including many prominent churchmen, like the prolific and well credentialled American Catholic writer George Weigel, who know Pell well, simply do not believe all this to be remotely possible.  Weigel wrote (in 2017 when the allegations first came to light):
More recently, the calumnies have become much darker, as the man who designed and implemented the Australian Church’s first vigorous response to the sexual abuse of the young has been charged with being an abuser. His friends are confident that the charges, like other fanciful allegations the cardinal has consistently denied and of which he has been exonerated, will be shown to be gross falsehoods—not least because we believe Pell is telling the truth when he flatly and forcefully denies the current accusations.
… Cardinal George Pell is a big man in every sense of the word and his stamina under assault is entirely admirable. Its deepest root, however, is not his native combativeness but Pell’s faith. Its solidity, and the courage to which that rock-solid faith gives rise, may be what aggravates his foes the most.
It’s also what inspires his legion of friends, among whom I am honored to number myself—for fifty years and counting.
Here, at this link, is the remainder of Weigel’s character reference, well worth reading in the light of all the mud that has stuck to the man.
Encomia from friends, even famous ones, prove nothing.  Yet the more recent trial judge dismissed the Ballarat matters partly on the grounds of a lack of tendency.  And we know the gargantuan efforts of the ABC, Victoria Police and Melbourne University Press in order to get other “victims” to present themselves as part of an emergent hit squad that would establish tendency.
In this case, character matters, and character does go to plausibility, to credibility, and to tendency.  Perhaps the blindness of the jury to the character of the accused in this case was a disadvantage to the accused, not an advantage.  As evidenced in the comments in response to Frank Brennan’s piece, even the thoughts penned by those who dislike Pell, find the charges highly improbable.
And so onwards we will now travel to the inevitable appeals process.  It would certainly be wise for those of us publicly commenting on this matter to hold some of our fire.  Yet I do not believe for a moment that the relentless lynch mob’s efforts will be stayed.
I have little doubt that the multiple members of the Pell attack team will return swiftly to the fray to do their worst, armed with all the weapons they have previously deployed and now aided by the “fact” that he has been “proven” to be guilty.  Just in case not all the mud stuck before the trials.  Like it says on the back of a cubicle in the male toilets at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast, “Cardinal Pell is a convicted criminal”.
Indeed, the hit-piece book that was so instrumental in leading the charge towards this abhorrent judicial outcome has gone straight back onto the shelves.
Perhaps above all this, and despite the fact that this legal nightmare for Pell is far from over and his attempts to clear his name are still incomplete, he has now been sacked from his Vatican job, having already been stripped earlier of his role as one of the Pope’s council of nine advisers on Vatican reforms.  This was much the same fate of Archbishop Philip Wilson, of course.  Found guilty.  Pressured to be sacked amid all the baying for blood among the mob, and finding an enemy in Malcolm Turnbull.  Then sacked on cue, in his case, as Archbishop of Adelaide.  Then totally exonerated at a subsequent appeal.
Mind you, given the chaotic mess and apostasy swilling now around Rome, I am not sure I, if I were George Pell, would ever wish to return to that sadly unholy place.
But that is not the point.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/03/the-pell-case-what-it-says-where-its-going/

Calling Cardinal Pell’s Prosecution What It Is: Religious Persecution

COMMENTARY: Now that the suppression order has been lifted, we are free to state what has been evident for several years now.

Father Raymond J. de Souza

Cardinal George Pell was exactly where he should have been Wednesday night in Melbourne: in jail.

Let Henry David Thoreau explain: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (Civil Disobedience).

Now that the peculiar “suppression order” in Australia has been lifted, we are free to state what has been evident for several years now. The prosecution of Cardinal Pell has been a monstrous miscarriage of justice, a religious persecution carried out by prosecutorial means.

Cardinal Pell was convicted last December for sexually assaulting two 13-year-old boys in 1996. The process that led to the convictions was, from the start, a sustained and calculated strategy to corrupt the criminal-justice system toward politically motivated ends.

And now Cardinal Pell is in jail, awaiting his sentencing next month. There is no shame that Cardinal Pell is in jail; the shame is sufficiently abundant to be worn by all those who put him there.

False Accusations

Miscarriages of justice do take place. Cardinal Pell himself was falsely accused in 2002, and, before him, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago was falsely accused in 1993. Both those accusations were resolved with recourse to the police or courts.

The case of Cardinal Pell, though, was not a miscarriage akin to a mistake. It was done with police and prosecutorial malice aforethought.

Americans ought not be surprised by this, for the list of wrongfully convicted is very long indeed. Even some on death row have been exonerated before their executions could be carried out.

Malicious Prosecution of Prominent People

The most famous recent case in the U.S. is the 2008 conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who lost a narrow re-election bid after a conviction for not reporting an alleged gift. Only after an FBI whistleblower revealed the grievous prosecutorial misconduct was Stevens exonerated. It came too late for his re-election, but his good name was restored. Stevens died in 2010.

If a Republican-led Justice Department can deliberately, maliciously and wrongfully convict the longest-serving Republic senator in the land, still popular in his home state, it would be relative child’s play for prosecutors in Victoria (Cardinal Pell’s home state in Australia) to deliberately, maliciously and wrongfully convict Cardinal Pell, who has been subject to a yearslong campaign of media defamation in Australia. Such was the intensity of the vilification that it would likely be possible to find a jury of 12 people in Melbourne who would believe that Cardinal Pell had sexually abused the boys, too.

Still, the case against Cardinal Pell was so grotesquely fantastical that it took the prosecutors two tries to get the convictions. The first trial, in September, ended in a hung jury, with jurors reportedly voting 10-2 to acquit. A retrial followed, with the jury reaching the necessary unanimity to convict in December.

The Supposed Facts of the Case

It is important for Catholics to know the specifics of the case, not just summary statements that it was “weak.” It was impossible.

The prosecution charged that Cardinal Pell, instead of greeting people after Mass, as was his custom, immediately left everyone in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and went unaccompanied to the sacristy. Arriving alone in the sacristy, he found two choirboys who had somehow left the procession of the other five dozen choirboys and were swigging altar wine.

Having caught them in the act, he then quickly decided to sexually assault them — “oral penetration,” to be unpleasantly precise.

This he accomplished immediately after Mass, with the sacristy door open, despite having all his vestments on and with the reasonable expectation that the sacristan, the master of ceremonies, the servers or concelebrants might come in and out or even pass by the open door, as would be customary after Mass.

Meanwhile, there were dozens and dozens of people in the cathedral, praying or milling about.

The whole affair took place within six minutes, after which the boys went off to choir practice and never spoke about it to anyone for 20 years, not even to each other. Indeed, one of the boys, who died of a heroin overdose in 2014, explicitly told his mother before he died that he had never been sexually abused.

The supposed facts are virtually impossible to complete. Ask any priest of a normal-sized parish — let alone a cathedral — if it would be possible to rape choirboys in the sacristy immediately after Mass. Sixty seconds — let alone six minutes — would not pass without someone, or several people, coming in and out, or at least passing by the open door. Ask any priest if he is customarily alone in the sacristy immediately after Mass, while there are still people in the church and the sanctuary has not yet been cleared.

Furthermore — again, with apologies for being graphic — it is not possible to perform the alleged penetration when fully vested for Mass. Again, ask any priest — let alone an archbishop, who is more heavily vested — about the awkwardness of having to visit the bathroom, if necessary, after vesting. It requires divesting, at least in part, or engaging in an awkward handling of the various vestments, which makes using the washroom difficult, to say nothing of a sexual assault.

The complainant said that Cardinal Pell had just moved his vestments aside, an impossibility, given that the alb has no such openings.

What Cardinal Pell was accused of doing is simply impossible, even if he had somehow been mad enough to attempt it. Moreover, any man who attempts raping boys in a public place with people about is the kind of reckless offender about whom there would be a long history of such behavior. There is, of course, no such history.

The Corruption of the Police

It is not astonishing that a jury of 12 ordinary citizens might be convinced, contrary to evidence and common sense, that Cardinal Pell was guilty. After all, dozens and dozens of highly trained and experienced police officers and prosecutors decided that the former archbishop of Sydney was guilty even before any charges were brought whatsoever. Such is the Australian hatred for the Catholic Church in general and George Pell in particular.

In 2013, the Victoria police launched “Operation Tethering” to investigate Cardinal Pell, even though there had been no complaints against him. There followed a four-year campaign to find people willing to allege sexual abuse, a campaign that included the Victoria police taking out newspaper ads asking for complaints about sexual abuse at the Melbourne cathedral — before there had been any.

The police had their man and just needed a victim.

With Australia going through the agony of a royal commission investigation into sexual abuse — with the Catholic Church garnering the lion’s share of the attention — it was only a matter of time before someone could be found to say something, or remember something, or, if necessary, fabricate it altogether. That, after all those efforts, the Victoria police could only pull together such a flimsy case is itself a powerful indication that Cardinal Pell is not a sexual abuser.

Testimony — or Not — of the Complainants

In Victoria sexual-abuse cases, the victim testifies in closed court, so the public does not know, and cannot evaluate, the credibility of what was said.

In the first trial, the complainant testified before the jury. They voted not to convict. In the second trial, the complainant did not testify at all, but the records of his testimony in the first trial were entered instead. It appears that the first jury, who heard the complainant live, found him less credible than the second jury, which did not encounter him live.

Cardinal Pell was thus convicted on the testimony of a single witness who presented an incredible story, without corroboration, without any physical evidence and without any previous pattern of behavior, over the strenuous insistence by the alleged perpetrator that nothing of the sort ever took place. That, almost by definition, meets the standard of reasonable doubt.

Even more astonishing, the jury convicted Cardinal Pell of assaulting the second boy, even though he had denied to his own family ever being molested. The second supposed victim died in 2014. He never made a complaint, was never interviewed by the police and was never examined in court.

Absent the public hatred for Cardinal Pell, such a case would never have even been brought to court. But just as the police had their man before they had any allegations or evidence, the prosecutors knew that they had a good chance of getting a jury that was so determined to get Cardinal Pell that they only had to give them a chance.

A Secret Trial

Under Victoria law, a judge can issue a “suppression order” that bans any and all reporting on a case if it is thought necessary to protect a trial from undue public pressure. The “suppression order,” which meant that even the charges against Cardinal Pell were not revealed until this week, more than two months after his conviction, was ostensibly to protect Cardinal Pell’s right to a fair trial.

In effect, it protected the prosecutors from having to defend the weakness of their case in the court of public opinion. If, almost two years ago, the prosecutors had had to argue in public that Cardinal Pell had raped two choirboys in a crowded cathedral immediately after Sunday Mass, there would have been at least some pressure on the Victoria attorney general to review whether mob justice was afoot, as it was last year in Australia, where Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide was convicted of covering up a sexual-abuse case. He was convicted, and though he did not want to resign before his appeal was heard, pressure from the Vatican, his brother bishops and the Australian prime minister forced him out.

Only months later, he was acquitted on appeal, with the appellate court judge ruling that the jury who convicted him was likely swayed by the public fury at the Catholic Church.

It happened again.Calling Cardinal Pell’s Prosecution What It Is: Religious Persecution

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/calling-cardinal-pells-prosecution-what-it-is-religious-persecution

George Pell: This saga has a long way to go yet

By TESS LIVINGSTONE  THE AUSTRALIAN FEBRUARY 28, 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 semi-public 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 ever 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’s biography of George Pell was published in 2002. She was asked for and provided a character reference for his trial that was not tendered.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/george-pell-the-george-pell-saga-has-a-long-way-to-go-yet/news-story/28119a929c7218ed3c2e7cc740e64325

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MARCH 1, 2019

St. John Paul II Is More Relevant Than Ever

JOHN HITTINGER

An informative, comprehensive, well written and persuasive book, The Splendor of Marriage was published by Angelico Press to mark the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968). In a culminating chapter, Richard Spinello lays out the argument of Humanae Vitae and makes it clear why the document is so central to Catholic doctrine and life. But this analysis is bolstered by a thorough account of St. John Paul II’s defense and elaboration of its central concepts and arguments. Through a well-developed Thomistic personalism, Pope John Paul II wrote some powerful and insightful accounts of love, marriage, and family. From his early treatise on Love and Responsibility, to various essays on love, marriage, and ethics, and his Person and Act, Cardinal Wojtyła used philosophical reason and phenomenology to clarify and defend the truth about the human good, particularly as it pertains to marriage and family. As pope he wrote various encyclicals and exhortations such as Familiaris Consortio, Letter to Families, Gospel of Life, Splendor of Truth, and his sustained meditations on human sexuality and marriage now compiled and called the theology of the body.

Drawing upon so many resources to make his case—the literary, the theological, philosophic, and phenomenological—John Paul II is rightly praised by his successor Pope Benedict as offering “a way of thinking in dialogue with the concrete, founded on the great tradition, but always in search of confirmation in present reality. It is a form of thought that springs from an artist’s gaze and, at the same time, it is guided by a pastor’s care…. This comprehension of man beginning not from abstractions and theoretical principles, but seeking to grasp his reality with love, was—and remains—decisive for the pope’s thought” (My Beloved Predecessor, pp. 8-9). Thus, Pope John Paul II must be credited with raising out of Humanae Vitae an exquisitely articulated and argued account of Catholic doctrine on marriage which displays the beauty and explains the rightness and goodness of a life lived out of profound respect for the gift of fertility. Those enemies of the Church without and the legion of dissenters within must continue to resort to caricature and reduction of Humanae Vitae to its prohibition of artificial contraception and to ignore its ample defense made by Wojtyła/John Paul II.

Spinello’s book, The Splendor of Marriage, brings our attention back to great achievement of Saint John Paul II. This is all the more needed in the Church given the ambiguities and dubia surrounding the doctrine as of late. It was curious and disturbing to hear that in 2016 our present pontiff attempted to rehabilitate the most bitter dissenter who frequently attacked St. John Paul II, namely Bernard Haring. Haring was a mentor and inspiration to Charles Curran. Indeed, Catholic moral theology needed renewal after the Council but Haring and John Paul II traveled different paths. Which one is the true path? This book makes the answer abundantly clear.

Spinello, who has written previous books on John Paul II, has attained a masterful command of the textual sources and he discusses various milestones in the life of John Paul II in order to illuminate his rich teaching and witness to life. The book contains ten chapters. The first two set the context by explaining why the pope was indeed “The Pope of the Family” and by sketching the many political, ideological, and moral threats posed to the integrity of marriage and family in our day. John Paul II wanted to be known as the pope of the family.  In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he wrote: “As a young priest I learned to love human love. … If one loves human love, there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the service of ‘fair love,’ because love is fair; it is beautiful. After all, young people are always searching for the beauty in love.” Many young people followed him throughout their lives, forming a group called “Śodowisko,” the importance of which one may gather from Weigel’s biographies.

Spinello devotes a chapter at the end of the book to John Paul II writings on the family, especially his Familiaris Consortio (1981) and his Letter to Families (1994). “The family is the first and most important path” for a person to walking “a path from which man cannot withdraw.” The vocation to motherhood and fatherhood are realized in family. It is the heart of education of the young, a community of service, founded on the law of free giving, and a domestic church. The current of the civilization of love passes through the family. It is no wonder that Pope John Paul II devoted so much effort and care to nurture family life, defend against the efforts to redefine it, subvert it, and limit its influence.

Church Teaching in Light of the Current Crisis
The present crisis in the Catholic Church is marked by so many problems it is difficult to know where to begin or help to find the unifying theme and subsequently how to find a coherent and effective solution. Richard Spinello correctly assesses the crisis and the path towards a solution in terms of the clash between the culture of life and the culture of death, as it swirls around the life of love, marriage, and the family. He cites the remarks of Sr. Lucia: “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue” (1981). Five years earlier when a cardinal visiting various locations in the United States, Orchard Lake, Michigan among them, he said:

We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel and the anti-Gospel…. It is a trial of not only our nation and Church, but in a sense a test of two thousand years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, human rights, and the rights of nations. As the number of people who understand the importance of this confrontation increase in Poland and America, we can look with greater trust towards the outcome of this confrontation. The Church has gone through many trials, as has the Polish nation, and has emerged victorious even though at a cost of great sacrifice.

In his Letter to Families he stated that “the family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that it is opposed to love” (LF §23). Precisely to keep the vision of John Paul II alive and to equip the faithful to meet the challenge of the day, Spinello offers this book. “Those who dare to enter onto the battlefield will need weapons. And some of the most potent weapons are the refined writings of St. John Paul II.”

The problem, according to Spinello, must be traced to the crisis of truth, the abandonment of the full truth about man and God. The terms love, freedom, marriage, even person, no longer convey their essential meanings and have been redefined through a secularist and historicist ideology. Such ideologies reject the natural order and refuse to affirm the created universe as a gift to be gratefully accepted and cultivated by the human person. Thus many people are now convinced that human sexuality does not have any intrinsic relationship to procreation, or to sexual differentiation and complementarity. The proponents of the “new green deal” question whether children should be brought into a world they see as polluted. More disturbing yet are those in the Church who “go along with this secular morality, to breezily exchange relevance for truth.” They fail to defend the whole truth, labeling it as an “ideal” that may conveniently be cast aside.

I would suggest that Spinello’s book be read in conjunction with Philip Lawler’s The Smoke of Satan. Lawler shows how the crisis of today has been brewing for decades—particularly through the habits of denial of the failures to live chastely and the specific refusal to teach and support Humanae Vitae. Lawler remarks that he has not once heard a homily on Humanae Vitae. I have heard more than one such homily, many by priests in various lay movements, but also in a parish setting, by the late Fr. Bill Carmody of Corpus Christi Parish in Colorado Springs, Colorado. But I have also heard Humanae Vitae mocked numerous times by the clergy. At our Cana Weekend for marriage preparation over 35 years ago a priest responded to my question about Humanae Vitae as follows: “If you are hung up on the authority bit, then go follow it, but the rest of you just follow your conscience.”

The Defense of Humanae Vitae
The principles for a proper understanding and defense of Humanae Vitae are laid out in three chapters on personhood and freedom, the personalistic norm, and the manifold and essential characteristics of true love. These philosophical principles are intricately connected and they are available to thought through a reflection upon human experience. The reader must work through the arguments as Spinello lays out seven key themes for our reflection and study. I will just briefly mention some of them. In the chapter on personhood he explains the notions of nature and person and balances the aspects of freedom and truth in personal existence. As John Paul II once said that the root error of socialism is anthropological, so too we could say that Western liberalism has a faulty anthropology in its exaltation of personal freedom and its subsequent ideas of personal self-sufficiency and the measure of utility through satisfaction of the manifold appetites of persons. It neglects or denies the truth of the good; it neglects or denies the communion of persons through gift.

Freedom and responsibility find their fulfillment in love. Sexuality must be understood in this context if it is to be human and the act of a person. Love is a relational dimension of personal existence. The differentiation and complementarity of male and female are signs of the gift character of personal existence and its fulfillment in spousal love. The importunities of concupiscence and the habits of life that follow from yielding to the selfish use of others typically blind the human person to the true characteristics of love and the demands it makes upon us. It is difficult to rise to the honesty of George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin.” The personalistic norm, that one not use the other as a means to selfish satisfaction, shines forth as a bright line. Mutual affirmation of the person and mutual recognition of a vocation to motherhood and fatherhood are the spirit of that norm when it comes to sexual activity.

Spinello follows Wojtyła, in his Love and Responsibility, in tracing out the many aspects of love such as fondness and attraction, desire, reciprocity, sympathy, and friendship to arrive at the spousal gift of love by which is established the communion of persons called marriage. Such a communion of persons is a covenant—more than a contract because of this total and mutual self-giving. Marriage is a promise for a permanent and perpetually binding commitment and is characterized by the properties of unity, fidelity, and fruitfulness. The identity and vocation of spouses to be mother and father are essential to this relationship and this bond.  Spinello summarizes these three key chapters on foundational principles as follows:

We have shown that interpersonal self-giving and receiving is the natural way of life for the human person, who can achieve fulfillment only in union or solidarity with others. Therefore, “man and woman were created for marriage,” because every person has a vocation to spousal love, and marriage is the primary way of living out that vocation. We have also uncovered the unique character of spousal love, this mutual belonging or personal communion, which is created by the free and total bodily gift itself. That total self-gift is not present in other forms of love, such as friendship or parental love. Sexual relations are appropriate only for spousal love, where sexual union is the sign and means of this authentic union of persons. (82)

These chapters are followed by one on chastity, to which I shall return, and then chapters on the sacramental dimension of marriage and on the encyclical Humanae Vitae. The encyclical simply defends the long-standing tradition of the Church, and of course in most societies, marriage has a fundamental procreative purpose which should not be subverted. Spinello notes that there was a great confidence in science and technology that inclined people to believe that life from birth could be controlled by medical techniques. And with the rise of new theologies, forms of existentialism and proportionalism, dissenters found a ready audience throughout Western liberal societies. Pope Paul VI took a prophetic stand—for now we see how this technology has not provided a magic bullet but is brought much abuse and disorder in personal lives and in families and society as a whole. And the new theologies have been overcome by the true renewal that has arisen through Vatican II; John Paul II drew upon these sources of renewal to make his case in defense Pope Paul VI, his mentor.

In this chapter, Spinello again shows his mastery of the many rich sources to reveal the mind of Pope John Paul II. His essay on the anthropological vision and particularly his defense of Humanae Vitae in the Theology of the Body provide a superb explanation of the teaching. He gives a more vigorous and reasoned account of these aspects of Catholic teaching that needed to be restated and defended in light of modern culture and other modern developments. The Church’s teaching on marriage, family, and family planning are particularly important points where this holds to be the case. And in the Wednesday audience talks on the encyclical he is particularly good in showing how the teaching of Vatican II, especially Gaudium et Spes, fully supports the teaching of Pope Paul VI. The hermeneutic of continuity is in full display in his careful examination of the texts.

Reasserting the Importance of Chastity
I would like to conclude this review by returning to the chapter on chastity. The dearth of chastity has much to do with the crisis of our time. As our cultural elite now shames and pillories those men who have taken advantage of others, the need for chastity never seems to occur to them as the only way to overcome such abuse. And so too the crisis in the Church that is now unfolding. I’ve heard firsthand accounts that there are certain religious orders who teach their novices and seminarians that celibacy simply means that the clergy do not get married and that it doesn’t require strict continence. This means they can rationalize and tolerate homosexual activity in the seminaries and in the priesthood. If continence is not seen to be obligatory, all the more does the virtue of chastity become absurd to a significant number of religious and laity. But how can there be any response to a universal call to holiness if there is a near universal mockery of chastity or at least the neglect of chastity?

Spinello once again shows the tremendous work done by John Paul II on the role of chastity in living a life of integrity in marriage and family. Chastity is the virtue that enables us to effectively deal with concupiscence and the disorder of desire. This virtue needs to be rehabilitated and its proper meaning restored. Chastity is not just about moderation or self-control but it is an inner attitude of respect for the other, an attitude of apprehending the beauty of the embodied person. John Paul II said that chastity is “a transparency of interiority without which love cannot be itself.” The essence of chastity is “the habitual readiness to affirm the value of the person in every context and to elevate the personal above all sensual or affective reactions.” The personalistic norm and the virtue of chastity save us from the depersonalization of sexuality and offer the only safeguard from the flood of sexual abuse and exploitation.

Josef Pieper, in Four Cardinal Virtues, explains the significance of temperance and chastity. The natural urge to sensual enjoyment, manifested in delight in food and drink and sexual pleasure, is “the echo and mirror of man’s strongest natural forces of self-preservation (self and species).” Further he says that “these forces are closely allied to the deepest human urge towards being, they exceed all other powers of mankind in their destructive violence once they degenerate into selfishness.” So even if temperance be the “least of the virtues,” the so-called sins below the belt should by no means be dismissed as of no account. Pieper explains that “temperance extends its ordering mastery down to the fountainhead from which the figure of moral man springs up.” Wojtyla wrote that there is a “distinct possibility about the failure to integrate love” and so temperance and chastity are necessary for the life lived according to the loving kindness that rejects using others and affirms the beauty of the other. Chastity in our day is indeed a heroic virtue, not because of the difficulty of chastity as if it were a stoic resolve to be joyless, but because of the magnanimous heart of love whose joy is true.

The great Dominican Lacordaire (1802-1861) in “Catholicism and Chastity” proclaimed that chastity is the “ground on which the world and the gospel never meet an accord and harmony, they must always remain as poles asunder.” The philosophers and men of the world are powerless to overcome concupiscence. The triumph of the Church, he says, comes from the chastity that it alone can produce, and particularly it needs the chastity of the priest. For he says “the heart remains ardent, like fire, by charity but firm, like granite, by chastity.” He wisely notes that the Catholic people will forgive the priest many faults as long as the sign of chastity remains upon his brow. He asserts that “the priesthood and chastity will ever be one and the same dignity, one and the same expression of the God Who saved the world upon the cross.”

In the nineteenth century, Lacordaire could exclaim that through twenty centuries the priesthood has undergone a trial but despite isolated scandals has remained safe and secure. Thus for good reason many have urged that the pontiff place the issue of active homosexuality in the priesthood on the agenda to solve the abuse crisis. Sins against chastity must not be dismissed as mere sins below the belt whose significance is inconsequential. For on this virtue stands the Catholic teaching on marriage and family, on it stands the honor and respect for the priesthood, on it stands a bright witness in a world marked by deep despair and disgust of the human condition and hearts shriveled by the lack of a magnanimous love.

We are in great debt to Professor Spinello for clearly explaining the essentials of the Catholic teaching on love, marriage, and family and in highlighting the special contribution that the many gifts of John Paul II brought to the Church and the world in his own celebration and defense of the family. John Paul II is indeed the pope of the family. For this reason, Spinello’s book offers many needed answers to the crisis in the Church and in our world today.

(Photo credit: CNA / L’Osservatore Romano)

Tagged as Humanae Vitae, Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, Josef Pieper, Pope John Paul II, Richard Spinello, The Splendor of Marriage (2018)49

By John Hittinger

John Hittinger is a professor in the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St Thomas, Houston and the author of Liberty, Wisdom and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory. He is the founder and director of the Pope John Paul II Forum for the Church in the Modern World and president of the International Catholic University, founded by Ralph McInerny (1929-2010), the co-founder of Crisis Magazine.

THEOLOGY

THE AMAZON SYNOD AND MARRIED PRIESTS

2019-02-28FATHER DAVID NIX

Crux reports “When the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon rolls around in October, the long-debated possibility of ordaining mature, married men to the priesthood in areas where there are priest shortages will be brought to the table.”

Ever notice that when he who St. Ignatius of Loyola calls “the enemy of human nature” floats propositions to men, that proposition always begins under the guise of “safe, rare and legal”? This is not only in matters of human life, but even in liturgical matters. Fr. Heilman shows here in Truth About Communion in the Hand While Standing that Holy Communion in the Hand only started in 1969 by “bestowing an indult – an exception to the law – under certain conditions.” Notice how eerily similar this idea of a rare “indult” is to the deadly phrase of what the US government once declared would be “safe, rare and legal.”

I speak Portuguese and I’ve been to Brazil three times, including a mission on the Amazon of Brazil. As Fr. Taborda SJ alludes to in the above Crux link, I too saw that many communities get confession and Holy Mass only once a year. This was usually done by a priest headed up a boat on one of the thousand tributaries of that sea-river to bring Christ to the indigenous people of Brazil.

So, what about all those poor people without the sacraments? Yes, the Amazon synod will probably decide that for the good “end” of the dissemination of the sacraments, and for the good “end” of the poor receiving the Eucharist (which I both admit are good!) we must begin the “means” of married priests. In fact, this is also the perfect time for this to get passed, politically speaking. This is because the Synod of Bishops in the Amazon will happen in October 2019, which is the same year (albeit months later) that we just finished the sex-summit in Rome. 

I can already hear the MSM: Wouldn’t marriage be a better pressure-release valve for sick priests than abusing each other or seminarians or children?Again, the end justifies the means: Married priests. Soon, the “safe, rare and legal” option becomes the norm, and when the exception becomes the norm, then the tradition becomes the rigorious exception requiring an indult (as found in the very term, “extraordinary form” of the Mass.) Yes, I am actually predicting that at this rate we will need an indult to stay celibate, were I not equally confident that the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary will arrive before the internal enemies of the Church have this much advance.

You may notice that every time evil wants its way in the Church in the 20th or 21st century, it attempts one of these two theological tricks:

1) The end justifies the means.
2 It is permitted to invert the First and Great Commandments for pastoral reasons.

For example, many priests have led married couples under “conscience” and “pastoral reasons” to use contraception, often due to medical reasons. But such priests still lead married couples to hell, despite odd modern protests by them that God would somehow honor broken human conscience more than His own Divine Law and Divine Revelation.

The Amazon Synod won’t be a pan-global mandate for seminaries to recruit married men. Indeed, as the article said, the Synod will first open the door for older married men to apply for Holy Orders. Thus, the notion of married western priests will be protected from alarmist outrage under pious pretexts like this: “Married priests will happen in rare cases of rural environments where the sacraments are greatly needed” or “This will only happen with viri probati.” Satan is a legalist who tells us that we would rather have the sacraments in sin, rather than holiness in the Church and holiness in the priesthood.

I’m not comparing married Byzantine Catholic priests or even Russian Orthodox priests to Satan or Roe v. Wade, for I fully realize that celibacy and the priesthood are parallel events that intertwine in the West. But this intertwining also has Apostolic roots of celibacy requested of Our Lord to His priests from the very beginning, and this virginity for the kingdom is exactly the last vestige of priestly holiness that I predict to be sunk quietly in the Amazon river in a manner “safe, rare and legal.” 

Jesus Christ said:
“For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”—Mt 19:12
Fifteen verses later:
“Then Peter said in reply, ‘See, we have left everything and followed you.”—v. 27

PRIESTHOOD

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Cardinal George Pell arrives at Melbourne County Court Feb. 27 in Melbourne, Australia. Cardinal Pell was found guilty Dec. 11, but the result was subject to a suppression order and was only able to be reported since Tuesday. (Scott Barbour/Getty Images)COMMENTARY |  MAR. 1, 2019Calling Cardinal Pell’s Prosecution What It Is: Religious PersecutionCOMMENTARY: Now that the suppression order has been lifted, we are free to state what has been evident for several years now.Father Raymond J. de Souza

Cardinal George Pell was exactly where he should have been Wednesday night in Melbourne: in jail.

Let Henry David Thoreau explain: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (Civil Disobedience).

Now that the peculiar “suppression order” in Australia has been lifted, we are free to state what has been evident for several years now. The prosecution of Cardinal Pell has been a monstrous miscarriage of justice, a religious persecution carried out by prosecutorial means.

Cardinal Pell was convicted last December for sexually assaulting two 13-year-old boys in 1996. The process that led to the convictions was, from the start, a sustained and calculated strategy to corrupt the criminal-justice system toward politically motivated ends.

And now Cardinal Pell is in jail, awaiting his sentencing next month. There is no shame that Cardinal Pell is in jail; the shame is sufficiently abundant to be worn by all those who put him there.

False Accusations

Miscarriages of justice do take place. Cardinal Pell himself was falsely accused in 2002, and, before him, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago was falsely accused in 1993. Both those accusations were resolved with recourse to the police or courts.

The case of Cardinal Pell, though, was not a miscarriage akin to a mistake. It was done with police and prosecutorial malice aforethought.

Americans ought not be surprised by this, for the list of wrongfully convicted is very long indeed. Even some on death row have been exonerated before their executions could be carried out.

Malicious Prosecution of Prominent People

The most famous recent case in the U.S. is the 2008 conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who lost a narrow re-election bid after a conviction for not reporting an alleged gift. Only after an FBI whistleblower revealed the grievous prosecutorial misconduct was Stevens exonerated. It came too late for his re-election, but his good name was restored. Stevens died in 2010.

If a Republican-led Justice Department can deliberately, maliciously and wrongfully convict the longest-serving Republic senator in the land, still popular in his home state, it would be relative child’s play for prosecutors in Victoria (Cardinal Pell’s home state in Australia) to deliberately, maliciously and wrongfully convict Cardinal Pell, who has been subject to a yearslong campaign of media defamation in Australia. Such was the intensity of the vilification that it would likely be possible to find a jury of 12 people in Melbourne who would believe that Cardinal Pell had sexually abused the boys, too.

Still, the case against Cardinal Pell was so grotesquely fantastical that it took the prosecutors two tries to get the convictions. The first trial, in September, ended in a hung jury, with jurors reportedly voting 10-2 to acquit. A retrial followed, with the jury reaching the necessary unanimity to convict in December.

The Supposed Facts of the Case

It is important for Catholics to know the specifics of the case, not just summary statements that it was “weak.” It was impossible.

The prosecution charged that Cardinal Pell, instead of greeting people after Mass, as was his custom, immediately left everyone in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and went unaccompanied to the sacristy. Arriving alone in the sacristy, he found two choirboys who had somehow left the procession of the other five dozen choirboys and were swigging altar wine.

Having caught them in the act, he then quickly decided to sexually assault them — “oral penetration,” to be unpleasantly precise.

This he accomplished immediately after Mass, with the sacristy door open, despite having all his vestments on and with the reasonable expectation that the sacristan, the master of ceremonies, the servers or concelebrants might come in and out or even pass by the open door, as would be customary after Mass.

Meanwhile, there were dozens and dozens of people in the cathedral, praying or milling about.

The whole affair took place within six minutes, after which the boys went off to choir practice and never spoke about it to anyone for 20 years, not even to each other. Indeed, one of the boys, who died of a heroin overdose in 2014, explicitly told his mother before he died that he had never been sexually abused.

The supposed facts are virtually impossible to complete. Ask any priest of a normal-sized parish — let alone a cathedral — if it would be possible to rape choirboys in the sacristy immediately after Mass. Sixty seconds — let alone six minutes — would not pass without someone, or several people, coming in and out, or at least passing by the open door. Ask any priest if he is customarily alone in the sacristy immediately after Mass, while there are still people in the church and the sanctuary has not yet been cleared.

Furthermore — again, with apologies for being graphic — it is not possible to perform the alleged penetration when fully vested for Mass. Again, ask any priest — let alone an archbishop, who is more heavily vested — about the awkwardness of having to visit the bathroom, if necessary, after vesting. It requires divesting, at least in part, or engaging in an awkward handling of the various vestments, which makes using the washroom difficult, to say nothing of a sexual assault.

The complainant said that Cardinal Pell had just moved his vestments aside, an impossibility, given that the alb has no such openings.

What Cardinal Pell was accused of doing is simply impossible, even if he had somehow been mad enough to attempt it. Moreover, any man who attempts raping boys in a public place with people about is the kind of reckless offender about whom there would be a long history of such behavior. There is, of course, no such history.

The Corruption of the Police

It is not astonishing that a jury of 12 ordinary citizens might be convinced, contrary to evidence and common sense, that Cardinal Pell was guilty. After all, dozens and dozens of highly trained and experienced police officers and prosecutors decided that the former archbishop of Sydney was guilty even before any charges were brought whatsoever. Such is the Australian hatred for the Catholic Church in general and George Pell in particular.

In 2013, the Victoria police launched “Operation Tethering” to investigate Cardinal Pell, even though there had been no complaints against him. There followed a four-year campaign to find people willing to allege sexual abuse, a campaign that included the Victoria police taking out newspaper ads asking for complaints about sexual abuse at the Melbourne cathedral — before there had been any.

The police had their man and just needed a victim.

With Australia going through the agony of a royal commission investigation into sexual abuse — with the Catholic Church garnering the lion’s share of the attention — it was only a matter of time before someone could be found to say something, or remember something, or, if necessary, fabricate it altogether. That, after all those efforts, the Victoria police could only pull together such a flimsy case is itself a powerful indication that Cardinal Pell is not a sexual abuser.

Testimony — or Not — of the Complainants

In Victoria sexual-abuse cases, the victim testifies in closed court, so the public does not know, and cannot evaluate, the credibility of what was said.

In the first trial, the complainant testified before the jury. They voted not to convict. In the second trial, the complainant did not testify at all, but the records of his testimony in the first trial were entered instead. It appears that the first jury, who heard the complainant live, found him less credible than the second jury, which did not encounter him live.

Cardinal Pell was thus convicted on the testimony of a single witness who presented an incredible story, without corroboration, without any physical evidence and without any previous pattern of behavior, over the strenuous insistence by the alleged perpetrator that nothing of the sort ever took place. That, almost by definition, meets the standard of reasonable doubt.

Even more astonishing, the jury convicted Cardinal Pell of assaulting the second boy, even though he had denied to his own family ever being molested. The second supposed victim died in 2014. He never made a complaint, was never interviewed by the police and was never examined in court.

Absent the public hatred for Cardinal Pell, such a case would never have even been brought to court. But just as the police had their man before they had any allegations or evidence, the prosecutors knew that they had a good chance of getting a jury that was so determined to get Cardinal Pell that they only had to give them a chance.

A Secret Trial

Under Victoria law, a judge can issue a “suppression order” that bans any and all reporting on a case if it is thought necessary to protect a trial from undue public pressure. The “suppression order,” which meant that even the charges against Cardinal Pell were not revealed until this week, more than two months after his conviction, was ostensibly to protect Cardinal Pell’s right to a fair trial.

In effect, it protected the prosecutors from having to defend the weakness of their case in the court of public opinion. If, almost two years ago, the prosecutors had had to argue in public that Cardinal Pell had raped two choirboys in a crowded cathedral immediately after Sunday Mass, there would have been at least some pressure on the Victoria attorney general to review whether mob justice was afoot, as it was last year in Australia, where Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide was convicted of covering up a sexual-abuse case. He was convicted, and though he did not want to resign before his appeal was heard, pressure from the Vatican, his brother bishops and the Australian prime minister forced him out.

Only months later, he was acquitted on appeal, with the appellate court judge ruling that the jury who convicted him was likely swayed by the public fury at the Catholic Church.

It happened again.

Father Raymond J. de Souza is the editor in chief of Convivium magazine.