Free Republic

Cardinal George Pell will be immediately freed from prison after Australia's High Court unanimously overturned his conviction on five counts of historical child sex abuse. The momentous decision, handed down Tuesday by Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, ends a five-year legal battle that started when a man in his 30s approached police alleging Pell had abused him as a child in the mid-1990s. At the time, Pell was Vatican Treasurer and the highest ranking Catholic official to ever be publicly accused of child sex offenses. Pell strenuously denied the charges, which he dismissed in a 2016 police interview as a "product...

When Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) met online to elect a new party leadership in January, hackers carried out a series of massive attacks aimed at throwing the summit into chaos. The attacks picked up speed every time delegates were about to vote. According to CDU spokespeople, the assailants, operating mostly from abroad, bombarded the party’s website with internet traffic to overwhelm its server. At some point, they succeeded. The site collapsed and the livestream of the event cut out. In the end, the CDU managed to push the intruders out […] Yet the thwarted attack illustrates the...

Pell was reportedly reprimanded for “interfering in sovereign business” by looking into the Vatican Secretariat of State’s dealings with a Swiss bank with a long track record of violating fraud safeguards.The Holy See’s relationship with a disreputable Swiss bank triggered an internal dispute between the Secretariat of State and Vatican financial authorities. At the center of the conflict was a multimillion-dollar line of credit used to fund a controversial investment in London property speculation. Sources inside the Vatican’s Prefecture for the Economy confirmed to CNA that a substantial part of the $200 million used to finance the Secretariat of State’s...