✣ Cardinal Pell defends handling of abuse cases
What happened? Cardinal George Pell faced a grilling last week from Australia’s royal commission. The cardinal answered detailed questioning via video link about his handling of past cases of sexual abuse in the Church. He admitted that he “should have done more” about rumours of abuse, but said he thought the authorities were dealing with them. After the hearings, Cardinal Pell had a “hard” and “emotional” meeting with a group of abuse survivors. What the media are saying “Was George Pell left in the dark or were we?” asked Louise Milligan at abc.net.au. She is still not completely sure. Milligan said that moments in Cardinal Pell’s testimony were “baffling” and that some pieces of the puzzle “don’t quite fit”. But Miranda Devine of Australia’s Daily Telegraph was clear. “After Cardinal George Pell’s 19 hours in the witness box of the child sex abuse royal commission, there is still no evidence he was complicit in the crimes and cover-up of the Catholic Church during his time as a junior priest in Ballarat,” she said, adding that critics of the cardinal who are “throwing stones” should take a look in the mirror. During the period in question, she said, “society was deaf, dumb and blind to the existence of child sexual abuse”. What the vaticanisti are saying At cruxnow.com, John Allen contemplated what the future holds for Cardinal Pell. He reached the surprising conclusion that the cardinal may well emerge stronger than before, especially given that the examination failed to uncover a “smoking gun”, namely that the cardinal knew about abuse and covered it up. But Allen pointed out that there are still calls for Pope Francis to remove Cardinal Pell from his job as the Vatican’s top financial officer. Allen concluded that if the cardinal does stay, he needs the Pope’s full support in his difficult programme of extensive financial reform. “Otherwise, the actual ‘grave risk’ to Francis’s image would be to allow criticism on one front to impede real change on another.”
