Cardinal George Pell, even after his release from prison, is still a disgrace to humanity.
I could have told you that even though, last month, his sex abuse conviction was overturned. But now there’s even more evidence of his wrongdoing.
To make sense of it, you need to know two things: First, for a time, Pell was the highest ranking Catholic leader to be found guilty for child sex abuse — or, as his lawyer callously called it, nothing more than a “plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating.”
Also, in late 2017, the Australian Royal Commission issued a report on child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. For all the problems it found, the section that dealt with Cardinal Pell was redacted because there were lawsuits against him.
That amounted to roughly 100 pages of documentation… all of which were unsealed yesterday because the legal case against Pell is over.
What did we learn from those pages?
Oh boy…
Cardinal George Pell was aware of children being sexually abused within the Archdiocese of Ballarat by notorious paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale, Australia’s child abuse royal commission found, and it was “implausible” that other senior church figures did not tell Pell abuse was occurring.
Ridsdale committed roughly 130 acts of sexual abuse against children, some as young as four years old, over the course of two decades. He’s one of the few priests currently in jail for those crimes. Pell always said in court he knew nothing about Ridsdale’s abusive actions, but the 100 pages we can now see show how there’s simply no way he could have been that ignorant. (He even lived with the man!)
Regarding another predator priest, the report says “We do not accept that Bishop Pell was deceived, intentionally or otherwise.”
Pell may be off the hook for his own alleged acts of sexual abuse, but the record will always show he had the power to stop other predators but chose not to.
The Catholic Church has absolutely no credibility when it comes to morality.
(Portions of this article were published earlier. Thanks to Bob for the link)