Cardinal Pell on Pope’s Letter: Critics Need Facts First
Catholic Communications (Sydney Archdiocese)
March 24, 2010The evil of sexual abuse has no place in the Catholic Church, and no one should doubt Pope Benedict XVI’s resolve to seeing it eradicated, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell said this week.
Which kinda begs the question really, which is: if sexual abuse has no place in the Catholic Church, why has it found such a happy home there? Secondly, while Pell certainly has no reason to doubt Ratso‘s claims, nobody else is under any particular obligation to invest them with any more authority than if they were uttered by, say, a child. “Without God we are nothing”, argued Pell recently, but as a speaker at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne stated, it would be more accurate to argue that without God, Pell is nothing.
See also : Alas for you George! (July 9, 2008).
In the photo, Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale (left) walks to court, accompanied by his support person (Bishop George Pell, then an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne), when Father Ridsdale was pleading guilty to his first batch of criminal charges in May 1993.
But no bishop accompanied the victims, who felt deserted by the church hierarchy. Therefore, Broken Rites quickly became Australia’s main support group for church-abuse victims.
Broken Rites has supported victims (male or female) from the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and the Uniting Church, as well as from smaller denominations.
About 90 per cent of the men and women who have contacted Broken Rites Australia have been from a Catholic background.
The researchers and advocates in the Broken Rites Australia executive team all have a Catholic background but we are non-denominational in our outlook.
There was a newspaper report a few years ago on what Pell may or may not have known when he shared the priests’ house with Ridsdale – can’t track it down, but I can say that presbyteries are not very private places. There are housekeepers and parishioners coming and going as well as the daily activities of the residents.
So someone, or several people may have known or guessed at various times during Ridsdale’s priesthood and chose not to say anything. And as the Broken Rites link points out, some of Ridsdale’s colleagues were also involved in child abuse.
The blog entry to which I link — Alas for you George! (July 9, 2008) — has links to the media coverage from mid-2008 regarding What George Knew. An ABC report meant Curious George got into a little bit of trouble for a letter he wrote in 2003, in which he contradicted the findings of an internal inquiry into child sex abuse: a curious ‘mistake’ (Pell), given the circumstances.
Suffer the Children…
I was in ireland in 1998/99 when a 4 part tv series about the abuse there was shown on TV. It was like a snowball effect, people telling their stories and revealing top priests dodgy pasts. That snowball is rolling around the globe and it doesnt look like ts gunna stop any time soon.
As someone with 2 uncles who are priests, i still dont give a fuck if the church implodes under the continuing revelations.
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