Pell and other allegations

Hmmm ... might be a touch close to the bone ..?

More tongue in cheek I’d say.

Pathetic human.

If this were a company or a sporting club people wouldve been in jail a long time ago, and the company dissolved.

But it’s a bunch of perverts with too much influence on simpletons and people in power.

What?!!!!

Child abuse of a female under 10 has been a criminal charge since 1928 in victoria. Since 1950 it has been illegal to have penetrative sex with a child under the age of consent (16), to procure a child under the age of consent for “immoral acts”, to indecently assault a child UTAC (oral sex etc). Some offences would have fallen into the (highly objectionable) anti-homosexual legislation prevalent at the time but was illegal nonetheless.

Unless Mulkearns is several hundred years old, the “i didn’t know if it was illegal” explanation is utter bullshit.

Not really, my parents didn’t know it was illegal until the 90’s.

No disrespect IT, and I have some very close friends who are victims. I do find it hard to understand that any parents would have this view until 1990. I am not asking you to explain or justify; I just find it one of those wow moments. I can recall way back in the 1960 at our church, when an assistant priest was accused of “tampering” with a child, that all parents knew it was wrong and illegal, and all children were warned. We were in a working class parish of strict irish and italian catholics, but wrong is wrong.

Also no disrespect intended, and I’m not disputing what you’ve said in your case but speaking more generally…the Eightes were not the dark ages.
In many respects I happen to think that they were more progressive than the times we live in now.
But in any case, Mr Bubbles was a thing.
There was a worse guy before that…I want to say Mr Evil…but I’m not sure.
These weren’t…they were front page and six o’clock news stories.

Wasn’t Mr Evil the villian off E-street?

Thinking of Toni Pearen and Melissa Tkautz is a nice afternoon treat for myself.

Slightly off topic, but I suspect you are thinking of Mr Cruel, who hasn’t been cuaght, though police suspect they know who is responsible. There was another called Mr Evil, who was caught.

Bombshell in todays hearing when Pell says of Rissdale's offending, "It's a sad story and it wasn't of much interest to me." Which pretty well summarises the position of the RCC on this issue.

Probably wasn’t of interest to him when he strolled into court with him. Or when threw a grand funeral for Nazareno Fasciale. Scum.

It's the same stuff he's always done. "It wasn't me." "I wasn't there." I didn't hear that." "I don't remember." all the while staring stone faced into victim's eyes. Guy is totally unaccountable despite having his nose in everything at the decision making level while these lecherous freaks were being concealed. Could not give the slightest care that it all happened. All the devil's fault.

You left a few excuses out “l didn’t do it”, “It wasn’t my fault” and “l was dead at the time.”

derp

Who would expect Pell to have a clear recollection of events ? After all the INSTITUTION is far more important than the individual - And the same people still support the Institution - There’s little hope in the world.

See I dunno, I came from a very strict and conservative catholic upbringing, and my parents still knew that priests (or anybody for that matter) shouldn't be touching up kids. Granted I was late 80's - early 90's, but still, I don't think there was some period of enlightenment on the topic just before that time.

One of the things that ■■■■■ me about it, is that I know of two separate cases in the 70’s of priests being kicked out of the church because they had sexual relations with a consenting adult woman.

You know, because of the whole chastity thing.

But sexual relations with a child? Nah, let’s just ignore that, that doesn’t count.

Yeah some of the things churches do are strange on that score.

In Protestant churches it used to be that if you divorced and then remarried you committed a terrible thing and you would get kicked out or shunned. If you had an affair while married, well that was bad but they would try and help you “get better” and they still loved you.

I could never work out how that worked.

Especially considering what the founder of the largest Protestant church in the UK and hence Australia did, and that was the reason he founded that church.

See I dunno, I came from a very strict and conservative catholic upbringing, and my parents still knew that priests (or anybody for that matter) shouldn't be touching up kids. Granted I was late 80's - early 90's, but still, I don't think there was some period of enlightenment on the topic just before that time.

One of the things that ■■■■■ me about it, is that I know of two separate cases in the 70’s of priests being kicked out of the church because they had sexual relations with a consenting adult woman.

You know, because of the whole chastity thing.

But sexual relations with a child? Nah, let’s just ignore that, that doesn’t count.

Yeah some of the things churches do are strange on that score.

In Protestant churches it used to be that if you divorced and then remarried you committed a terrible thing and you would get kicked out or shunned. If you had an affair while married, well that was bad but they would try and help you “get better” and they still loved you.

I could never work out how that worked.

Especially considering what the founder of the largest Protestant church in the UK and hence Australia did, and that was the reason he founded that church.

lol Yeah funny that

What?!!!!

Child abuse of a female under 10 has been a criminal charge since 1928 in victoria. Since 1950 it has been illegal to have penetrative sex with a child under the age of consent (16), to procure a child under the age of consent for “immoral acts”, to indecently assault a child UTAC (oral sex etc). Some offences would have fallen into the (highly objectionable) anti-homosexual legislation prevalent at the time but was illegal nonetheless.

Unless Mulkearns is several hundred years old, the “i didn’t know if it was illegal” explanation is utter bullshit.

Not really, my parents didn’t know it was illegal until the 90’s.

No disrespect IT, and I have some very close friends who are victims. I do find it hard to understand that any parents would have this view until 1990. I am not asking you to explain or justify; I just find it one of those wow moments. I can recall way back in the 1960 at our church, when an assistant priest was accused of “tampering” with a child, that all parents knew it was wrong and illegal, and all children were warned. We were in a working class parish of strict irish and italian catholics, but wrong is wrong.

Also no disrespect intended, and I’m not disputing what you’ve said in your case but speaking more generally…the Eightes were not the dark ages.
In many respects I happen to think that they were more progressive than the times we live in now.
But in any case, Mr Bubbles was a thing.
There was a worse guy before that…I want to say Mr Evil…but I’m not sure.
These weren’t…they were front page and six o’clock news stories.

Wasn’t Mr Evil the villian off E-street?

Thinking of Toni Pearen and Melissa Tkautz is a nice afternoon treat for myself.

Slightly off topic, but I suspect you are thinking of Mr Cruel, who hasn’t been cuaght, though police suspect they know who is responsible. There was another called Mr Evil, who was caught.

Are we still talking about E Street here?

What?!!!!

Child abuse of a female under 10 has been a criminal charge since 1928 in victoria. Since 1950 it has been illegal to have penetrative sex with a child under the age of consent (16), to procure a child under the age of consent for “immoral acts”, to indecently assault a child UTAC (oral sex etc). Some offences would have fallen into the (highly objectionable) anti-homosexual legislation prevalent at the time but was illegal nonetheless.

Unless Mulkearns is several hundred years old, the “i didn’t know if it was illegal” explanation is utter bullshit.

Not really, my parents didn’t know it was illegal until the 90’s.

No disrespect IT, and I have some very close friends who are victims. I do find it hard to understand that any parents would have this view until 1990. I am not asking you to explain or justify; I just find it one of those wow moments. I can recall way back in the 1960 at our church, when an assistant priest was accused of “tampering” with a child, that all parents knew it was wrong and illegal, and all children were warned. We were in a working class parish of strict irish and italian catholics, but wrong is wrong.

Also no disrespect intended, and I’m not disputing what you’ve said in your case but speaking more generally…the Eightes were not the dark ages.
In many respects I happen to think that they were more progressive than the times we live in now.
But in any case, Mr Bubbles was a thing.
There was a worse guy before that…I want to say Mr Evil…but I’m not sure.
These weren’t…they were front page and six o’clock news stories.

Wasn’t Mr Evil the villian off E-street?

Thinking of Toni Pearen and Melissa Tkautz is a nice afternoon treat for myself.

Slightly off topic, but I suspect you are thinking of Mr Cruel, who hasn’t been cuaght, though police suspect they know who is responsible. There was another called Mr Evil, who was caught.

Are we still talking about E Street here?


Want there a mister Stinky too?

ah well George, when the church boots you out there could be a job waiting for you at ( insert)

just give Vvlad or Mikey a bell

George Pell yesterday: “It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me.”
George Pell today: “They realised very clearly I was not cut from the same cloth,” he told the inquiry. They [Catholic Education Office] would have been fearful … that I would have asked all sorts of inconvenient questions if I’d been better briefed."

Gee George, maybe you should get your story straight. Would you or would you not have done something about this IF you had known? Seems to me one day you said you didn’t care and the next you say it was hidden from you because you would have done something about it.

ah well George, when the church boots you out there could be a job waiting for you at ( insert)

Bastion.

Bastion board meeting

Apparently one Andrew Bolt has called Pell out now too.

Apparently one Andrew Bolt has called Pell out now too.

Someone keep an eye on DT.

George Pell wasn’t much interested in stories of abuse by priests. Which was lucky for his career
David Marr
Had Pell made a big fuss about the abuse going on all around him as a young priest, he would not be at the Vatican. But as he told the royal commission, he stayed clear of such ‘sad stories’

Tuesday 1 March 2016 06.20 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 1 March 2016 06.22 GMT

Here’s my theory. George Pell returned to Ballarat as a young priest with big plans. And why not? He’d gone from Rome to Oxford, where he reckons he was the first Catholic priest to earn a doctorate of philosophy since the Reformation.

Analysis Cardinal Pell testimony brings sex abuse to Vatican’s doorstep
Decision not to return to Australia has had consequence of bringing uncomfortable questions to Rome.

Big things were expected of him back in Australia. He expected big things of himself. But for the next 25 years he found himself serving bishops whose record of handling paedophile priests was (in Ballarat) appalling and (in Melbourne) seriously flawed.

Pell is seeing out his career as cardinal in charge of the Vatican’s finances. But what would have happened to his mighty career if early on he had crossed those bishops?

Had young Pell made it his business to find why the paedophile Father Gerald Ridsdale was being shifted from parish to parish in the 1970s – in later years by a committee on which he himself sat – he might well be living the twilight years of his career not in Rome but the seaside parish of Warrnambool.

From Pell’s evidence on the second day of his Roman cross-examination there emerged a picture of an ambitious and capable young priest who decided, early on, to steer clear of this dangerous issue.

On Monday Pell admitted knowing bits and pieces about some of the offenders and some of their crimes in Ballarat. He earned credibility for that. But on Tuesday he swore blind he knew nothing about the worst of them all: Ridsdale.

Fellow priests who knew the truth told him nothing. Complaints rife in several parishes never reached him. And his bishop, Ronald Mulkearns, never let him know about the complaints of Ridsdale’s abuse he had been fielding for a decade.

Pell called Mulkearns’ silence “a gross deception”.
George Pell says he was deceived over sexual abuse allegations
But the devastating admission drawn from Pell by Gail Furness SC, counsel assisting the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, was that he never bothered to ask.

“It was a sad story and of not much interest to me,” he told the commission. By the late 1970s he was a busy priest running the Catholic Institute of Education. “I had no reason to turn my mind to the evils Ridsdale had perpetrated.”

Except that he still sat on the committee moving Ridsdale around Ballarat, leaving – as he admits now – fresh victims behind every time and finding new ones in every new parish.

Cardinal George Pell agrees to meet survivors after completing child sexual abuse royal commission evidence – as it happened
The chief financial adviser for the Vatican and Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic cleric has concluded a third day of evidence before Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse
Read more
Pell never asked anyone, it seems, why this priest was shifted every couple of years, from Apollo Bay to Inglewood to Edenhope to Bungaree to Kangaroo Flat to Mortlake and, finally, to a desk job in Sydney.

“It could have been the man was perpetually restless,” ventured the cardinal.

Furness was lethal. The commission’s chair, Peter McClellan, joined her in a brutal tag team. Pell reeled, blustered and hectored. At times McClellan gave the impression of a man on the point of explosion.

Pell lectured the commission on canon law. His point? To explain the power of the hierarchy, the authority of bishops and the lowly place of priests in that pecking order. He heaped all the blame on Mulkearns.

Furness was unimpressed. Priests, assistant priests, episcopal advisers and several members of that Ballarat committee on which Pell sat all knew the truth about Ridsdale and didn’t act. Wasn’t the failure in Ballarat a general failure?
“That is a vast and misleading statement,” snapped Pell.

Furness and McClellan homed in on the responsibility of individual priests like him: if bishop didn’t act to save children, weren’t priests compelled to act?

Pell insisted a priest’s responsibility, while never nil, depended on their place in the hierarchy. Bishops remain in charge. So what does a priest do who is worried by the inaction of his bishop? Write to the Papal Nuncio.

There was laughter in the Sydney hearing room through much of this. Muffled crowd noises were coming down the line from Rome.

Was I alone in wishing Furness would ask: should they call the cops? Pell answered the question unasked. “I’m not sure at that stage there was even a civic responsibility to report such a crime.”

The cardinal was speaking from the heart. By the look of things he has failed to convince the royal commission that he did his duty by the children of Ballarat. But he has surely convinced them of his loyalty to the hierarchical church. “A priest has a moral responsibility to do what is appropriate to his position,” he declared in the last minutes of his evidence.

McClellan countered: “Isn’t it a moral responsibility to do whatever he can to bring the conduct to a halt?”

Pell replied: “I think that’s a reasonable position.”

But reading that as a concession would be a mistake. In Pell’s world, a priest can only do so much. And his evidence to the commission on Monday suggests that in his Ballarat years, that wasn’t a lot.

His whole life lay before him

George Pell yesterday: "It's a sad story and it wasn't of much interest to me." George Pell today: "They realised very clearly I was not cut from the same cloth," he told the inquiry. They [Catholic Education Office] would have been fearful ... that I would have asked all sorts of inconvenient questions if I'd been better briefed."

Gee George, maybe you should get your story straight. Would you or would you not have done something about this IF you had known? Seems to me one day you said you didn’t care and the next you say it was hidden from you because you would have done something about it.

Do you expect Pell to tell the whole truth ? - The institution of the Catholic Church is far more important than a few parishioners - And the same parishioners who still support the Catholic Church -There is nothing to see.