George Pell: cardinal found guilty of child sexual assault

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/26/cardinal-george-pell-vatican-treasurer-found-guilty-of-child-sexual-assault

by xiaodai • 7 years ago

41 10 7 years ago

theguardian.com

joshschreuder• 7 years ago

If you feel like you've heard this already in December and are unsure why it's in the news again, there was a media suppression order that prevented it from being reported in Australia, due to a second court case involving Pell that was due to start in April.

That case was dropped today due to insufficient evidence and the supression order is no longer in place, so the Australian media can now report freely.

senectus12• 7 years ago

Bill Marr being appropriately brutal.

thomasfoster96• 7 years ago

The article is by David Marr.

wp381640• 7 years ago

who wrote The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell a seminal biography of the now-convicted cardinal[0]

Also one of Australia's best journalists

[0] https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/david-marr/2013/09/18/137...

senectus12• 7 years ago

lol. htf did i get his name wrong facepalm

xlii2• 7 years ago

What I find most interesting in recent findings is how millenias of beaurocratic development are completelly defenceless against current stage of technology.

For past couple centuries, Church created notion of "we are judge of ourselves" which most often either meant delegating case to far away place, which no interested party could visit, or by reloacting to another region with unlikely connection (and this connection was very unlikely, since Catholic Church keeps their own births, deaths and movement metrics, so those were far from random).

Right now, since everything is transparent and just few taps away, this method no longer works and Church is totally lost in how to deal with it. Senior members refute all responsibility either through long-hardened loyalty or - in some cases - to protect their own wrongdoings from coming out. That makes the matter even worse. Elderly age and resulting lack of will to change doesn’t help the case either.

I think of it as a David vs Goliath fight, where Goliath is more than 2000 years of institutional experience and David is a kid with a camera in his smartphone.

tomhoward• 7 years ago

This case is about an alleged incident around 23 years ago - 10-15 years before smartphones or IP security cameras were widespread.

xlii2• 7 years ago

And yet it closed only in December. My point is not about victims recording acts of violence, but about church not being able to defer ad infinitum and making illusionary ammends.

trhway• 7 years ago

His authority came from Rome, where he sat on a number of councils policing church doctrine. These were the years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith worked up fresh hard teachings to revile homosexuals.

"Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" is the renamed Inquisition :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

"With the exception of the Papal States, the institution of the Inquisition was abolished in the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the Spanish American wars of independence in the Americas. The institution survived as part of the Roman Curia, but in 1908 it was renamed the "Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office". In 1965 it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith."

mnm1• 7 years ago

This is part of a much larger issue that seems to have no boundaries and exist pretty mouth everywhere: that authorities are uninterested in processing rape cases and bringing the perpetrators to justice. Time and time again they let the perpetrators' institutions handle this. The church. The university. The corporation. Why don't authorities subpoena records instead of letting these institutions destroy them? This is their whole reason for existence, after all. Is it because so often the victims are women and children who are thought of as less than by the police and other authorities? It's despicable that each case is not investigated. Most times even rape kits are not tested, let alone any other kind of investigation. We have given these authorities the power to investigate these crimes and yet they do nothing. It seems to be a worldwide problem too. Are children and women that worthless to the men in power that their rape doesn't deserve investigation, that they do not deserve justice?

George Pell: cardinal found guilty of child sexual assault

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