That’s the Exclusive Brethren (or closed Brethren), a very strange bunch. Not sure if they still do it but they used to build churches with no external windows so people couldn’t look in. You also could not just walk in off the street, they close the doors on outsiders. They used to have a shop in Burnie (Tassie) when I lived there and the only person you could talk to was the guy manning the register, no one else would even look at you and if you tried talking to them they would quickly go out the back, especially the women.
Then you have the open Brethren, essentially just another protestant church but with the different concept that they had no pastor or lead minister. They operated under the principle off having a group of elders who ran the place not just one man. In principle not a bad idea, in a practical sense there was always one alpha male that made the decisions when it needed one voice. Senior Elder is what he was called. They are similar to Baptists and our church worked closely with them. Nothing like the Exclusive nutters though, just a similar name. Actually a guy I used to know and spent some time with became a pollie, he was brethren (the open one, not the nutters). Classic pollie and well suited to becoming one. Some of you would know of him (Brett Whiteley). And no I would not have voted for him if I was still there.
And Pell cared so deeply about the issue of children being abused that he then went on to abuse children while he was in charge of the church’s response to abusing children.
RCC set up Melbourne to retain control over victims and their claims. Be serious Shelton10, they didn’t set it up because they were trying to right the many wrongs.
I’ve never said he’s perfect or even good. I’ve only ever objected to people stating that he has done things that he has never in fact even been accused of, or that everything he has ever done has been evil.
I would have thought if he has been convicted of child sexual abuse (which he has been) then I’m pretty entitled to gloss over his other ‘virtues’, esp as far as those virtues relate to child sexual abuse!
There are certain crimes that are so serious that I think they can wipe out a lifetimes work of good work (if we concede that he did do good work). I would have thought murder rape, and child sexual abuse would be those three.
I’m just trying to work out if it’s all celebrity kiddie fiddlers Shelton has a boner for, or just this one in particular.
Never mind that the “Melbourne response” - ie the quasi legal investigations, rock-spider hide-and-seek, and hush-hush pay-offs, was the making of Pell, within the Vatican. That says a lot about where their priorities lie. Still.
Instead of focusing on the children he did molest, how about we focus on the children he DIDNT molest? I mean that’s pretty good right? What a good bloke
I think the three I mentioned would be automatics. There might be others which other people would consider make the list (assault, armed robbery, hell even culpable driving) but I would have though the three I mentioned we’d have near universal agreement on (with perhaps the exemption of a very sad self defence battered woman type of murder)
It’s freely available. Most of it comes from reading a lot of media reports. Much also from Wikipedia, including the facts about the Melbourne Response. I haven’t read the whole of the Royal Commission report, but I’ve read parts of it. Also the Victorian parliamentary committee report, which covered much of the same ground.