“The Lord is
purifying his bride (the church) and
is converting us
all to himself”: Pope Francis
“[The Church's] structure is totally ordered
to the holiness of Christ's members.
And holiness is measured according to the
'great mystery' in which the Bride responds
with the gift of love to the gift of the
Bridegroom." …. Mary goes before us all in the holiness that is
the Church's mystery as "the bride without spot or wrinkle."….
This is why the "Marian" dimension
of the Church precedes the "Petrine.”
Rome — The clerical abuse
scandal has caused everyone in the Catholic Church "pain and unbearable
suffering," Pope Francis said, but it also is a call to repentance and the
renewal of the church.
"Our humble repentance, which remains silent
between our tears for the monstrosity of sin and the unfathomable greatness of
God's forgiveness, this, this humble repentance is the beginning of our
holiness," the pope told priests from the Diocese of Rome.
Pope Francis' annual
Lenten meeting with the priests March 7 began with a penitential prayer service
and individual confessions at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral
of the Diocese of Rome.
In a long, impromptu talk on priesthood and
forgiveness, the pope acknowledged the clerical sexual abuse crisis and the
particular way it had impacted priests.
"Sin disfigures us," he said, and it is
"humiliating" when "we or one of our brother priests or bishops
falls into the bottomless abyss of vice, corruption or, worse still, of a crime
that destroys the lives of others," like the sexual abuse of minors does.
Pope Francis said he is convinced the abuse
scandal is ultimately the work of the devil.
"Still, do not be discouraged," he told
the priests. "The Lord is purifying his bride (the church) and is
converting us all to himself. He is putting us to the test so that we would
understand that, without him, we are dust."
God is working "to restore the beauty of his
bride, surprised in flagrant adultery," the pope said.
Focusing much of his talk on the Exodus story of
God forming his people, teaching them, castigating them and leading them to the
promised land, Pope Francis insisted that God must teach his people humility so
that they recognize he is God and they are totally dependent on him.
When the ancient Israelites made the golden calf,
he said, "a patient process of reconciliation began, a wise pedagogy
through which God threatens and consoles, makes them aware of the consequences
of the evil done and decides to forget their sin, punishes the people and heals
the wounds he inflicted."
God threatens to abandon his people, and he lets
them experience some of what it might mean to be without him, the pope said.
"We've experienced this, these awful moments of spiritual
desolation."
But the Lord always returns, allowing people to
learn to fear their own powerlessness, their slyness, the way they say one
thing and do another, he said.
Confession, for priests like for any Catholic, is
a moment of coming face to face with one's own weakness, being honest and
saying out loud how one has sinned, he said. It's like removing the mask or
makeup people usually wear so no one sees their faults.
Pope Francis told the priests they should not
expect to be always understood, accepted and appreciated, but "let us
believe in the patient guidance of God, who does things in his time, opening
our hearts and placing ourselves at the service of his word of
reconciliation."
[End of article]
Related to this, the sexual abuse
scandal, is the case of Australia’s George Cardinal Pell.
A U.S. priest has just sent this
article on Cardinal Pell from the National
Catholic Register:
Calling
Cardinal Pell’s Prosecution What It Is: Religious Persecution
COMMENTARY: Now
that the suppression order has been lifted, we are free to state what has been
evident for several years now.
Father
Raymond J. de Souza
Cardinal George Pell was exactly where he should have
been Wednesday night in Melbourne: in jail.
Let Henry David Thoreau explain: “Under a government
which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (Civil Disobedience).
Now that the peculiar “suppression order” in
Australia has been lifted, we are free to state what has been evident for
several years now. The prosecution of Cardinal Pell has been a monstrous
miscarriage of justice, a religious persecution carried out by prosecutorial
means.
Cardinal Pell was convicted last December for
sexually assaulting two 13-year-old boys in 1996. The process that led to the
convictions was, from the start, a sustained and calculated strategy to corrupt
the criminal-justice system toward politically motivated ends.
And now Cardinal Pell is in jail, awaiting his
sentencing next month. There is no shame that Cardinal Pell is in jail; the
shame is sufficiently abundant to be worn by all those who put him there.
False Accusations
Miscarriages of justice do take place. Cardinal Pell
himself was falsely accused in 2002, and, before him, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin
of Chicago was falsely accused in 1993.
Both those accusations were resolved with recourse to the police or courts.
The case of Cardinal Pell, though, was not a miscarriage akin to a mistake. It
was done with police and prosecutorial malice aforethought.
Americans ought not be surprised by this, for the
list of wrongfully convicted is very long indeed. Even some on death row have
been exonerated before their executions could be carried out.
Malicious Prosecution of Prominent People
The most famous recent case in the U.S. is the 2008
conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who lost a narrow re-election bid
after a conviction for not reporting an alleged gift. Only after an FBI
whistleblower revealed the grievous prosecutorial misconduct
was Stevens exonerated. It came too late for his re-election, but his good name
was restored. Stevens died in 2010.
If a Republican-led Justice Department can
deliberately, maliciously and wrongfully convict the longest-serving Republic
senator in the land, still popular in his home state, it would be relative
child’s play for prosecutors in Victoria (Cardinal Pell’s home state in
Australia) to deliberately, maliciously and wrongfully convict Cardinal Pell,
who has been subject to a yearslong campaign of media defamation in Australia.
Such was the intensity of the vilification that it would likely be possible to
find a jury of 12 people in Melbourne who would believe that Cardinal Pell had
sexually abused the boys, too.
Still, the case against Cardinal Pell was so
grotesquely fantastical that it took the prosecutors two tries to get the
convictions. The first trial, in September, ended in a hung jury, with jurors
reportedly voting 10-2 to acquit. A retrial followed, with the jury reaching
the necessary unanimity to convict in December.
The Supposed Facts of the Case
It is important for Catholics to know the specifics
of the case, not just summary statements that it was “weak.” It was impossible.
The prosecution charged that Cardinal Pell, instead
of greeting people after Mass, as was his custom, immediately left everyone in
St. Patrick’s Cathedral and went unaccompanied to the sacristy. Arriving alone
in the sacristy, he found two choirboys who had somehow left the procession of
the other five dozen choirboys and were swigging altar wine.
Having caught them in the act, he then quickly
decided to sexually assault them — “oral penetration,” to be unpleasantly precise.
This he accomplished immediately after Mass, with the
sacristy door open, despite having all his vestments on and with the reasonable
expectation that the sacristan, the master of ceremonies, the servers or
concelebrants might come in and out or even pass by the open door, as would be
customary after Mass.
Meanwhile, there were dozens and dozens of people in
the cathedral, praying or milling about.
The whole affair took place within six minutes, after
which the boys went off to choir practice and never spoke about it to anyone
for 20 years, not even to each other. Indeed, one of the boys, who died of a
heroin overdose in 2014, explicitly told his mother before he died that he had
never been sexually abused.
The supposed facts are virtually impossible to
complete. Ask any priest of a normal-sized parish — let alone a cathedral — if
it would be possible to rape choirboys in the sacristy immediately after Mass.
Sixty seconds — let alone six minutes — would not pass without someone, or
several people, coming in and out, or at least passing by the open door. Ask
any priest if he is customarily alone in the sacristy immediately after Mass,
while there are still people in the church and the sanctuary has not yet been
cleared.
Furthermore — again, with apologies for being graphic
— it is not possible to perform the alleged penetration when fully vested for
Mass. Again, ask any priest — let alone an archbishop, who is more heavily
vested — about the awkwardness of having to visit the bathroom, if necessary, after
vesting. It requires divesting, at least in part, or engaging in an awkward
handling of the various vestments, which makes using the washroom difficult, to
say nothing of a sexual assault.
The complainant said that Cardinal Pell had just
moved his vestments aside, an impossibility, given that the alb has no such
openings.
What Cardinal Pell was accused of doing is simply
impossible, even if he had somehow been mad enough to attempt it. Moreover, any
man who attempts raping boys in a public place with people about is the kind of
reckless offender about whom there would be a long history of such behavior.
There is, of course, no such history.
The Corruption of the Police
It is not astonishing that a jury of 12 ordinary
citizens might be convinced, contrary to evidence and common sense, that
Cardinal Pell was guilty. After all, dozens and dozens of highly trained and
experienced police officers and prosecutors decided that the former archbishop
of Sydney was guilty even before any charges were brought whatsoever. Such is
the Australian hatred for the Catholic Church in general and George Pell in
particular.
In 2013, the Victoria police launched “Operation Tethering” to
investigate Cardinal Pell, even though there had been no complaints against
him. There followed a four-year campaign to find people willing to allege
sexual abuse, a campaign that included the Victoria police taking out newspaper
ads asking for complaints about sexual abuse at the Melbourne cathedral —
before there had been any.
The police had their man and just needed a victim.
With Australia going through the agony of a royal commission
investigation into sexual abuse — with the Catholic Church garnering the lion’s
share of the attention — it was only a matter of time before someone could be
found to say something, or remember something, or, if necessary, fabricate it
altogether. That, after all those efforts, the Victoria police could only pull
together such a flimsy case is itself a powerful indication that Cardinal Pell
is not a sexual abuser.
Testimony — or Not — of the Complainants
In Victoria sexual-abuse cases, the victim testifies
in closed court, so the public does not know, and cannot evaluate, the
credibility of what was said.
In the first trial, the complainant testified before
the jury. They voted not to convict. In the second trial, the complainant did
not testify at all, but the records of his testimony in the first trial were
entered instead. It appears that the first jury, who heard the complainant
live, found him less credible than the second jury, which did not encounter him
live.
Cardinal Pell was thus convicted on the testimony of
a single witness who presented an incredible story, without corroboration,
without any physical evidence and without any previous pattern of behavior,
over the strenuous insistence by the alleged perpetrator that nothing of the sort
ever took place. That, almost by definition, meets the standard of reasonable
doubt.
Even more astonishing, the jury convicted Cardinal
Pell of assaulting the second boy, even though he had denied to his own family
ever being molested. The second supposed victim died in 2014. He never made a
complaint, was never interviewed by the police and was never examined in court.
Absent the public hatred for Cardinal Pell, such a
case would never have even been brought to court. But just as the police had
their man before they had any allegations or evidence, the prosecutors knew
that they had a good chance of getting a jury that was so determined to get
Cardinal Pell that they only had to give them a chance.
Under Victoria law, a judge can issue a “suppression
order” that bans any and all reporting on a case if it is thought necessary to
protect a trial from undue public pressure. The “suppression order,” which
meant that even the charges against Cardinal Pell were not revealed until this
week, more than two months after his conviction, was ostensibly to protect
Cardinal Pell’s right to a fair trial.
In effect, it protected the prosecutors from having
to defend the weakness of their case in the court of public opinion. If, almost
two years ago, the prosecutors had had to argue in public that Cardinal Pell
had raped two choirboys in a crowded cathedral immediately after Sunday Mass,
there would have been at least some pressure on the Victoria attorney general
to review whether mob justice was afoot, as it was last year in Australia,
where Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide was convicted of covering up a
sexual-abuse case. He was convicted, and though he did not want to resign
before his appeal was heard, pressure from the Vatican, his brother bishops and
the Australian prime minister forced him out.
Only months later, he was acquitted on appeal, with
the appellate court judge ruling that the jury who convicted him was likely
swayed by the public fury at the Catholic Church.
It happened again.
