Fr. Roger J. Landry
Putting into the Deep
The Anchor
March 22, 2019
Lent is a time in which we relive spiritually the events of Jesus’ sham trials for the supposed crimes of blasphemy and sedition leading ultimately to his crucifixion.
It’s also a time in which we ponder his words from the Last Supper, “No slave is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (Jn 15:20). Jesus sends us out “like sheep in the midst of wolves” promising that people, including those closest to us, will hand us over to courts, scourge us in places of worship, and lead us before civil leaders to give witness. He says that we will be “hated by all” because of his name and some of us will, like him, even be put to death (Mt 10:16-22). But he assured us, “Blessed are you when they revile you … and utter every kind of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven” (Mt 5:11-12).
These reminders provide the proper context to try to comprehend the unbelievable injustice that is happening to Cardinal George Pell in Australia, who on March 12 was sentenced to six years in prison after having been found “guilty” on December 11 of five charges that he sexually abused two choristers of the Melbourne cathedral choir in 1996.
False accusations of sexual abuse against clergy, we know, are relatively rare. In the United States, historically less than ten percent of accusations have been demonstrated to be false. The just response to the Church’s failure adequately to protect and help sexual abuse victims in the past, however, is not to allow innocent clerics or other personnel to become victims of character assassination through false accusations — or worse, to be convicted of crimes by perhaps the worst of all false witness. We must defend the innocent cleric with a similar zeal to that with which which we protect innocent children and hold accountable who hurt them.
That’s why it’s important for all Catholics to be praying for Cardinal Pell — and for those who seek justice to raise up our voices as strongly as the young prophet Daniel when Susanna was falsely accused by two corrupt judges for refusing their advances (Dan 13).
It’s impossible, of course, for anyone who was not present to have absolute certainty that something did not occur. It is possible, however, for anyone who studies the facts of the Pell case with a fair mind not only to have reasonable doubt that he didn’t do what he is accused of, but moral certainty that he in fact could not have done it.
The accusation is that on December 15 or 22, 1996, in one of the first two Masses in the newly renovated Cathedral of Melbourne, the 6’3” Archbishop Pell ditched his Master of Ceremonies, miter bearer and crozier bear, and everyone else, to leave the militaresque recessional procession and follow two 13-year-old choir boys — who were supposed to be processing directly to a Christmas concert rehearsal — into the sacristy behind the altar. There, after busting the singers for gulping red sacramental wine, he abused them for six minutes while the sacristy door remained open.
One of the supposed victims died in 2014 before testifying, but told his mother on two separate occasions that he had never been abused by anyone. The other claimant said that Pell forced him to perform a sex act on him while the Archbishop was still fully vested in pants, a shoe length cassock, a shoe-length alb, a tight belt-like cincture, a stole and chasuble, even though every priest will tell you that it is supremely cumbersome even to go to the restroom fully vested in that way. All of this happened with no one intruding, in a sacristy that on Sundays is ordinarily like Grand Central Station. The sacristan had disappeared. The lectors had disappeared. The concelebrating priests had disappeared. The altar servers had disappeared.
After the alleged abuse was completed, the choirboys supposedly returned to choir rehearsal without their director or any of their several dozen fellow choristers noticing that they and their voices had been missing — the director, in fact, said that they had not been missing — and the Archbishop returned fully vested to the entrance of the Cathedral to greet exiting Massgoers who were excited to meet their new Archbishop and apparently had waited patiently the whole time.
During trial, there was no corroboration of the accusations at all, including by witnesses called by the prosecution, whereas Pell provided 20 alibis. Moreover, the supposed victims never told anyone about the putative abuse for more than 20 years. The victim who testified said that Pell had parted his episcopal garments down the middle to facilitate the abuse, despite the fact that albs are can’t part, the cassock would have to be unbuttoned one button at a time underneath the alb, and the pants and belt holding them would somehow need to be reached by only God knows how. Employees of the Cathedral testified that those in the sacristy had no access to wine — it was locked in a vault — and that the wine used was always white, not red. The victim’s memory of the layout of the Cathedral also did not align at all with the accusations made.
Beyond this, in 1996, upon becoming Archbishop of Melbourne, Pell had created the Australian Church’s foremost response to the sexual abuse crisis, by insisting upon safe environment requirements that would only happen in the U.S. six years later. Pell would have known intricately what would have given even the appearance of scandal — and conspicuously leaving a procession to follow boys into a sacristy alone would surely have qualified. Moreover, if someone was so desperate to commit sexual crimes against minors that he would do so on one of his first Sundays in his newly renovated Cathedral, in a public place, while others were waiting for him, would not common sense tell us that he would have left a whole string of victims abused in far less cavalier ways? And yet there are none…
So how was such a 12-0 guilty jury verdict possible? Evidently, because the jury pool had been tainted by unrelenting attacks on the Church as a whole as well as on Cardinal Pell.
The 2013-17 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse focused much of its attention on the failures of the Church, creating the impression that the Church was almost like a crime syndicate protecting its own from prosecution for crimes against minors. With regard to Pell, he was by far the most notable face of Australian Catholicism for a generation as Archbishop of Melbourne, then Sydney, then Cardinal, and finally the one chosen in 2013 by Pope Francis to fix Vatican finances. He was a regular newspaper columnist, television and radio commentator, who was very happy to debate — with the toughness that befits a former Australian rules football player — people who attacked Church teaching on abortion, gay rights, women’s ordination, or various other progressive issues, or scientific ones like global warming. He was the focal point of anti-Catholicism, anti-clericalism, and anti-conservatism in a highly secular country.
Three examples of the poisoning of the well:
In 2016, singer Tim Minchin released “Come Home (Cardinal Pell),” which rose to number 11 on the Australian Singles Chart, was nominated for Song of the Year by the Australasian Performing Rights Association and has 3.3 million views on Youtube. Among the lyrics: “I want to be transparent here, George: I’m not the greatest fan of your religion and I personally believe that those who cover up abuse should go to prison … Come home, Cardinal Pell, I’ve got a nice spot in hell with your name on it. … If you don’t feel compelled to come home by a sense of moral duty perhaps you will come home and … sue me.”
In the same year, Pell critic, journalist Louise Milligan published “Cardinal: The Rise and the Fall of George Pell,” which tried to make a case against him, putting together rumors and innuendo back to his days as a young priest.
And in 2013, the State of Victoria launched a task force entitled Operation Tethering to search for complaints against him before they had ever received any, taking out newspaper ads asking whether anyone had ever been abused at the Melbourne Cathedral. Many prominent Australian legal commentators have questioned before, during and after the jury proceedings, where a fair trial for Pell was possible.
Imagine you were seated on a jury in which the accused was the head of a powerful mafia that you believed was guilty of a whole series of most serious crimes, but the prosecutors didn’t do a great job on the particular case they were making, the witnesses for the prosecution had various inconsistencies, and the hotshot defense attorney had done everything and more to give reasonable doubt as to the accusations. Would it really be easy to vote to acquit? Even if it wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the mafioso had committed the crimes in question, wouldn’t it be likely that he had committed some other crimes somewhere and that society would be better off, and justice better served, with him behind bars, minimally to teach everyone a lesson?
American journalist John Allen recently wrote, “Due to negative media coverage and his own combative disposition, Pell occupies roughly the same spot in public opinion as Osama bin Laden did in the United States post 9/11.” Would you on a jury acquit bin Laden even if the prosecution’s case had holes?
It would be similarly hard for a jury in Melbourne to let Cardinal Pell walk free. And yet in the first trial, ten of the twelve jurors found him not guilty with 11 needed to acquit, resulting in a mistrial. That first trial raises the possibility that the second jury, which convicted Pell 12-0, might have not given the same weight to the exonerating evidence as the first and might have chosen to overlook the many inconsistencies and impossibilities in the testimony of the accuser. The fact that the second jury convicted him 12-0 of abusing the boy who died in 2014 after telling his mother that he had never been abused, with no evidence that he did other than the other victim’s inconsistent testimony, shows that they might have gone into the jury room convinced there was no space for reasonable doubt about his guilt no matter what evidence was provided, refuted, or not provided.
Pell has appealed to a panel of senior judges, who have the option of declaring an “unsafe verdict,” one that pronounces that the jury could not have rationally reached the conclusion it did based on the evidence, and thereby making Pell’s conviction null and void. That’s what we all should be praying for now.
In the meantime Cardinal Pell is in a solitary confinement jail cell prevented from celebrating Mass, as he enters more deeply into the Passion of the Lord and helps leads the reparation of the Church for the sins of clerical sexual abuse, even though he is as guilty of those sins as Jesus was of blasphemy and sedition.
