Lawfare In Australia #1 Comments In 2022 by Senior Conservative Craig Kelly About The Socialist Left Imprisonment Of Cardinal George Pell

So this problem is global.

The Nazis were national fascists and liberals are global fascists.

Whole I do sympathize with Cardinal Pell for his unjust imprisonment, the Catholic church has a problem that, even today, needs to be much more thoroughly and publicly addressed beyond the settlements.

Cardinal Pell was innocent on compelling factual grounds but offered a prominent target for rabid prosecutors and anti-Catholic activists. Eventually, even Pell's accuser admitted that the clerical molestation story he told simply could not have applied to Pell as a matter of simple chronology.

To Pell's great credit, despite mistreatment and hostility in prison, he remained a model of Christian humility and compassion. He freely forgave his accuser and those who mistreated him. And Pell never denied or sought to minimize the Church's all too real guilt in so many episodes of clerical abuse.

There is some mystery as to how and precisely why the case against Pell arose. Plausibly, it was aided and spurred on by those responsible for corrupt financial practices in the Vatican which Pope Francis had commissioned Pell to investigate. As it was, the charges against Pell effectively subverted that effort.

A few years ago your fellow Aussie,naturalman1975,posted pieces here about Cardinal Pell's ordeal in his firm belief that the Cardinal was innocent. I recall having read here that despite the Cardinal having been convicted an appeals court reversed the conviction.

However,I wasn't aware that his prosecution was seen as an effort by the left to damage the Catholic Church or to score points against "conservatives" as are recent stunts by our Democrat Party against Trump and his allies.

According to their name, The Nazi’s were National Socialists.

Which is why liberals call conservatives nazi’s. Liberals, on the otherhand, are fascists but they want fascism globally.

The fascists were bloody amateurs compared to the Maoists. Today's “progressives” look to “Rules For Radicals” and Mao's Red Guards for guidance regarding how to “fundamentally transform” the US.

Let’s not forget the indictment of Casper Weinberger three days before the election when George HW Bush was running for reelection. Bush lost, and shortly thereafter, the charges against Weinberger were dropped.

You answered the question in your last paragraph with the content of your last paragraph. It’s ALWAYS the $$

Yes, Cardinal Pell was ultimately acquitted of the crimes of which he was originally sent to prison by a 7-0 unanimous ruling by the High Court of Australia that the prosecution, and the (Victorian) Court of Appeal had both inverted the presumption of innocence and rather than require the case to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, had instead imposed on Pell's defence to prove the case was utterly and totally impossible.

It was an incredible miscarriage of justice - basically it was a witch hunt, and it came extremely close to succeeding.

However,I wasn't aware that his prosecution was seen as an effort by the left to damage the Catholic Church or to score points against "conservatives" as are recent stunts by our Democrat Party against Trump and his allies.

That, I think, could still be described as a somewhat unproven thesis, but I think there is a lot of truth in it.

From outside Australia, it's probably quite difficult to have any knowledge of how hated George Pell was by a lot of progressives. I think it is probably fair to say, he was their big bogeyman from the mid 1990s onwards - when he first came to real public prominence, it was as Archbishop of Melbourne, and at that time, the big thing that upset the left was that he was very public in refusing to condone homosexuality. Left wing activists used to attend his Masses wearing rainbow sashes and he would not give them Communion - he blessed them but he said that he could not give them Communion in such a situation. This caused massive, massive outrage.

This was at about the same time, that the genuine scandal about child sex abuse by Catholic clergy was first gaining prominence here, and because he was already a public figure of hate by then, he became the target of a lot of hate about that - what the people expressing that hatred always failed to understand was part of the reason the scandals emerged at that time, was because George Pell stopped the coverups that had been routine in Melbourne, before he became Archbishop - his predecessor, Archbishop Sir Frank Little, had covered up a great deal, in common with many other senior clergy. Viewed objectively, Pell was one of the first senior Catholic clerics to move away from that approach - but that isn't the popular narrative.

What happened to Pell was a witch hunt by the left. The Victoria Police engaged in some very, very questionable practices to try and 'get Pell' - the most famous of which is now the fact that they advertised in the media for 'victims' to come forward - they didn't even have a complaint against Pell, nobody had come forward with any accusation. But the biggest person involved in the witch hunt was an ABC journalist named Louise Milligan - the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) is Australia's government funded public television and radio broadcaster, and it has a major left wing bias problem (which it generally denies). She wrote a book called Cardinal which was basically a hit piece on George Pell, making all sorts of accusations against him. To be fair to Milligan, I think she does her best to be an honest journalist - but unfortunately, she is one of those people who has adopted the attitude that accusations of sexual abuse are always true and that those who claim to be victims should always be believed, and does take it to the extreme of arguing that alleged perpetrators must always be assumed to be guilty. While she is definitely hard left, I'm not sure she was personally biased against Pell - she may have been, but her treatment of him isn't really any different than how she'd treat anybody accused - as guilty by default.

Basically - yes, it was a witch hunt. And it was largely a matter of the left going after the biggest 'conservative' target they had in Australia. Not all of them - critically and crucially, Father Frank Brennan SJ, probably Australia's most prominent 'left-wing' social justice priest (he's also a human rights lawyer) had the integrity and honesty to come out in support of Pell - I like this quote from him -

Sure, I've had all sorts of fights with Cardinal Pell in the past and I'll probably have some more in the future. They'll be about esoteric theological points in the Catholic Church that won't need to worry your viewers. But I couldn't care if I like him or dislike him - whether his theology is the same as mine or not. If a prominent citizen like that is going to be targeted by the police, by the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions), and then given second rate treatment by an appeal court, I say I've got a job to do to be out there and say the rule of law should apply to everyone. Including one George Pell, even though he is a Cardinal of the Catholic Church.

Brennan speaking out, probably did more than anything to get honest people on the left (and they do still exist) at least willing to consider the evidence and entertain the possibility Pell could be innocent.

If people really want to understand the case and exactly what happened, there are two books I'd recommend - the titles make it fairly clear what they argue:

The Persecution of George Pell by Keith Windschuttle.

Cardinal Pell, the Media Pile-On & Collective Guilt by Gerard Henderson.

Former Prime Minister John Howard wrote the foreword to that second book, and that says a lot as well. Howard was one of our greatest and most conservative Prime Ministers, but he is also at his core a calculating politician. If he had any doubt about Pell's innocence, he would have stood back - no politician wants to defend a 'child molester' - but the fact is, he didn't. I honestly don't believe anybody who objectively looks at the evidence could believe Pell guilty - just the fact that literally dozens of people were with Pell on the steps of Saint Patrick's Cathedral at the precise moment the alleged crime was supposedly taking place should have been enough in any balanced analysis to say it didn't happen - that is how bad the guilty verdict was.

It was a witch hunt by the left, and Victoria Police were complicit - I think, in part, to divert attention away from their own historical failings in this area (it has basically been proven that until the 1970s at least, Victoria Police helped the Catholic Church cover up abuse and I think that modern police command, at best, were overzealous in their attempt to show things had changed, and, at worst, were actively willing to target an innocent man to try and divert attention from their own failings - at the very worst, they may have even been politically corrupted by the government of Premier Daniel Andrews - whose immediate reaction to Cardinal Pell's acquittal was to publicly declare he still 'believed the victims').