Reading Cardinal George Pell's Prison Journal - Bishop David Farrer's Admiration And Some Mark Twain Humor

“There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him …… “ – Mark Twain ...........

As a Cardinal, George Pell became the second most successful Australian Catholic ever, behind Saint Mary of the Cross.

Then a Socialist Left injustice system imprisoned him for conducting a mass ...........

Some voices rate Pell’s prison journal as one of the greatest works of literature produced in Australia. Pell's Anglican friend, Bishop David Farrer sees it as a remarkably uplifting call to prayer ......,....

Perhaps the following words of Twain can help us to see through humor that there is no single easy human way to fully comprehend why Pell’s life in Australia finished as it did:

“Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them.”

The Cardinal was ultimately acquitted on appeal unanimously by the High Court of Australia (7-0) which is Australia's highest court. At that moment, he was considered innocent under Australian law, and I firmly believe that was the correct decision.

In its statement, outlining its decision, the High Court stated:

Today, the High Court granted special leave to appeal against a decision of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Victoria and unanimously allowed the appeal. The High Court found that the jury, acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a doubt as to the applicant's guilt with respect to each of the offences for which he was convicted, and ordered that the convictions be quashed and that verdicts of acquittal be entered in their place.

.....

The Court held that, on the assumption that the jury had assessed the complainant's evidence as thoroughly credible and reliable, the evidence of the opportunity witnesses nonetheless required the jury, acting rationally, to have entertained a reasonable doubt as to the applicant's guilt in relation to the offences involved in both alleged incidents. With respect to each of the applicant's convictions, there was, consistently with the words the Court used in Chidiac v The Queen (1991) 171 CLR 432 at 444 and M v The Queen (1994) 181 CLR 487 at 494, "a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof".

In simple term, the High Court has never been clearer in overturning a guilty verdict - "The High Court found that the jury, acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a doubt as to the applicant's guilt"... a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof."

The bottom line that lead to the High Court clearing the Cardinal was that the alleged crime could not possibly have happened in the way the prosecution alleged. The prosecution alleged that the Cardinal (then an Archbishop) had sexually assaulted two boys in a particular room at a very particular time - the reason they settled on this location and time is that it was the only possible time they could find where the Cardinal and the two boys could possibly have ever been together - in essence, it was a five minute period in the sacristy at St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, immediately after one of the first two Masses, he celebrated there as Archbishop. It could be pinned down to that place based on the testimony of the surviving complainant (only one of the two boys was still alive) who said that was where it happened. And it could be pinned down to that time based on the complainant saying it had happened after a Mass during Advent where he had been a choirboy. Undisputed records showed only two Masses where the Cardinal had been present, and the boy had been part of the choir. After both those Masses, undisputed records showed there was a choir rehearsal immediately after Mass, so there was only a very brief period when the boys might not have been with the entire choir.

Hence the alleged crime, if it happened, had to have happened in about a five minute period in that sacristy.

The Jury, and the Court of Appeal, found Pell guilty even though there was a large amount of evidence that showed that the sacristy would have been full of people during this five minute period, and there was evidence that the Cardinal was actually standing on the steps outside the Cathedral during this five minute period - evidence that the prosecution didn't even seriously dispute.

In essence, the crime was impossible. And the High Court found that was so.

Why was he convicted in the first place?

Speculation - but there were actually two trials, that were conducted in secret - the media was not allowed to report on the trials. They weren't even allowed to report they were happening. The reason for this was supposedly to protect the Cardinal's rights - at the time, there was a possibility he might be tried over additional accusations and there was concern that if he was found guilty at one trial, it would be difficult for a trial in that case, to be conducted without the jury assuming guilt. In the end, all charges in that second case were eventually dropped on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to justify a trial.

Anyway, Pell faced two secret trials on the 'choirboy' case. At the first trial, the jury could not reach a verdict - reportedly they voted 11-1 Not Guilty, but the law required a unanimous verdict. So a second trial was held, where the jury returned a guilty verdict. Why the difference?

Between those two trials, something happened here - the Prime Minister stood up in Parliament and made a formal apology to the victims of institutional child sexual abuse. As part of this, he stated that victims should always be believed. And the media took up this refrain as well - we must always believe the victims. It is now felt that the second jury at the second trial, may have been influenced by this idea - that the victim had to be believed regardless of the evidence, and so returned a guilty verdict.

The case then went to the Court of Appeal, which is part of the (state) Supreme Court of Victoria, where three judges reviewed the evidence. They voted 2 to 1 to uphold the guilty verdict. Why?

The two judges that voted to uphold the verdict were not experienced criminal law judges - they had come to the Supreme Court based on their experience in civil law, rather than criminal law. In civil law, verdicts can be based on the balance of probability, unlike criminal law which is based on the idea that a person must be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The only experienced criminal law judge on the Court of Appeal was the one who voted to overturn the jury verdict and find Pell not guilty. The two civil law judges voted to uphold the verdict.

According to the dissenting judge - and the High Court agreed with his dissent - the other two judges wrongly imposed their civil law principles on a criminal law case. In essence, they 'inverted' the standard of proof - they required Pell to prove he was innocent, rather than requiring the prosecution to have proved he was guilty.

I suspect they were also unduly influenced by the idea that victims must always be believed as well, but that was not strictly speaking relevant to Pell's final appeal. The High Court simply found that the evidence that was available just wasn't compelling enough to prove Pell was guilty, given the number of witnesses who put him elsewhere at the time (on the Cathedral steps), and the number of witnesses who were in the room where the crime supposedly happened at the time it supposedly happened.

There's a lot more to it than all this - the case should probably have never gone to trial in the first place, and there is real evidence to suggest it came about as a result of a witch hunt by Victoria Police, possibly influenced by the state government wanting to 'get Pell' as a scapegoat for genuine and horrible crimes committed by Catholic priests. Pell, as one of Australia's most prominent Christian and conservative figures, has long been hated by the extreme secular left in Australia. He was also very senior in the Catholic heirarchy here when stories of the historical abuse and coverups of sexual abuse by Catholic priests first broke in the 1990s and in the eyes of the public, a lot of people associate him with that - most not understanding that most of those crimes had happened decades earlier, and just because he was in charge when the stories broke, doesn't mean he was responsible for them - in fact, I would argue that part of the reason the stories broke is because he, and his generation of church leaders, stopped the coverups. In the interests of full disclosure, some do think he may have been involved at a low level in some coverups in the Diocese of Ballarat in the 1970s, when he was a Parish Priest there and acted as an advisor to the Bishop of Ballarat - I personally disagree with that (I think the Bishop didn't tell his advisors why he was moving priests around, and Pell and others assumed it was because of affairs with women, rather than abuse of children) - but it isn't impossible that Pell might have had some involvement with coverups then - what is clear is that when he later became a Bishop, and then an Archbishop, he did not cover things up, but worked to expose them, even refusing orders from the Vatican that tried to stop him. The point is that Pell was already hated by the left in this country, and it would have been very convenient to them for him to have been branded as a child molester.

(Also, to be fair, there were some people in the left establishment who spoke up strongly for Pell's right to a fair trial, and stated their belief in his innocence - Father Frank Brennan SJ, one of Australia's most prominent 'social justice' left wing priests was uncompromising in coming out in support of Pell, despite their massive doctrinal differences - Fr Frank Brennan: Anatomy of a travesty. He has written his own book on the case. His stand was important in getting quite a few people on the left to accept the possibility that, whatever they thought of Pell politically and ideologically, he might actually have been innocent. I wish there were more on the left like Brennan - honest people, whatever I may think of their ideas.

This is quite long so I'll leave it here - but I was very exercised by the case. Until it was corrected, it was one of the darkest and most egregious miscarriages of justice in Australian legal history.

I feel for the victims of sexual abuse. They should see justice. But convicting the wrong person doesn't do anything for justice.

I suspect the man who accused Pell probably was abused. I just think that it's possible that he fixated on the wrong person as his abuser. Maybe because Pell symbolised the Church for him, and he was victim of another priest. He might even sincerely believe it was Pell - if he was molested at the Cathedral by a priest he couldn't identify, the Archbishop in charge of that Cathedral might well seem the likely perpetrator to a person looking back on their childhood. Especially if he's the person you keep seeing over and over again in the media, presented as some sort of monster.

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