Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests

Our Catholic tabloid frenzy about fallen priests has become a scandal of its own. As we tackle it Beyond These Stone Walls, Fr. Stuart MacDonald joins our team.

Wednesday July 28, 2021

Back in 2019, I wrote a post entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” I had no idea at the time that a reader in Texas sent a copy of it to Cardinal Pell who was then serving a deeply unjust sentence in an Australia prison. I also did not know at the time that he was writing a prison journal that, after his exoneration and release, would be published to become a highly celebrated masterpiece of priestly witness in a time of trial. I have been reading the Second Volume of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell published by Ignatius Press, and I was moved to see that I appear prominently therein.

Over the course of four pages in the book (57-61) Cardinal Pell, from his prison cell, recounts a summary of my own travesty of justice and then thanks me, at the end, for my support of him:

“I am grateful to Fr. MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr. Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr. Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes. I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr. MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu: ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. (1742)”

I was deeply moved because there are not many in our Church, and certainly precious few with the prominence of Cardinal Pell, who would openly cite something I wrote and commend me for it. I will return to the importance of this.

Writing my own prison journal for Beyond These Stone Walls has always been somewhat of a letdown in the summer months. I do not write for accolades or approval, but I admit that it is nice to at least be noticed. In eleven years of writing this prison journal, the months of June through August have always seen our smallest readership. Who could blame you? I, too, would rather be in the water.

Something unexpected happened this year, however. My posts for June and July 2021 generated an explosion of readers and new subscribers setting an eleven-year record. My recent post, “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul” topped the list of recent titles that went off the charts. That post is about a matter of Sacramental integrity, but it also speaks to the very heart of what it means to be Catholic in the public square. The “Catholicism” moderator at Reddit rejected it twice as a “political post,” but I do not think the Reddit moderator actually Reddit (pun intended!). Some in other venues who dismissed it as political or partisan changed their minds after reading it to the end. Most Catholic readers thanked me for writing it. A smaller minority of Catholics were furious with me for writing it, but they refuted none of it.

I did not at all expect the vast response that post evoked. It was most evident in the comments it generated, but it was also evident in the traffic. Readers by the thousands came to it from Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and unlike most other BTSW posts, 90-percent of its readers were in the U.S. It had the highest one-day record for both visitors and new subscribers.

But I have no awareness that the people who most should read it did read it: the Catholic Bishops of the United States. So at the request of several readers, our friend and new Canon Law advisor, Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, created a printable 5-page PDF version that you could print and mail to anyone you wish, including your bishop. We have also compiled a PDF contact list of the United States Catholic Bishops organized by state. Here are the links:

PDF of Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

PDF List of U.S. Bishops and Contact Information by State

Cardinal Pell being released from prison in 2020, and Father Gordon MacRae being taken to prison in 1994.

Our Catholic Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests

As recent posts here have demonstrated, this is not an easy time to be a priest in a divided and politically partisan America. It is an exponentially more difficult time to be a bishop. Please keep that in mind when writing to them. Our shared goal must be communion and solidarity, not confrontation. That should not in any way inhibit the faithful from being faithful in the clarity of our message. We should write as though the very integrity of the Catholic Church in America is at stake — because it is.

Few of us ever awaken in the morning with a decision to become an activist that day. Activism is technically defined as “a theory or doctrine of assertive action, such as a strike or public demonstration, used as a means of supporting or opposing a controversial issue, person, or event.” Having known Father Stuart MacDonald for some time, I would never have considered him to be an activist, nor would I have ever applied that term to myself.

In recent years, as a number of my posts suggest, the need for Catholic action in support of priests and the priesthood has become evident. The newly formed “Coalition for Canceled Priests” is a good first step in that direction. I cannot speak for this coalition, but one facet of its activism has become clear to me. A minority of more “progressive” and powerful bishops of the United States has tried to steer the narrative, not only about the priesthood, but also about the hierarchy of concerns of Catholics. My post, “Biden and the Bishops” lays out the fault lines of this effort. (More recently, we have seen the influence of this progressive suppression in the Motu Proprio of Pope Francis on the Traditional Latin Mass. This will be our topic on BTSW next week.)

But there is something else that must happen before Catholics engage their bishops about the treatment of priests. We must put an end — in our own hearts and beyond — to our Catholic tabloid frenzy about fallen priests. Satan has never felt more fulfilled than in seeing priests fall at the hands of their own bishops.

Many priests have fallen morally to the point of the total collapse of their priesthood. Why should this be a surprise to any of us? Is there anyone, in the spiritual battlefield of our time, with a bigger satanic target on his back than a Catholic priest in the trenches? In our current climate of fear and loathing, the Church does nothing to catch them on their way down as they fall, nor is anything done to stem the tide of their descent. We just let them fall, and then discard them at the bottom. We as a Church make it very clear that there is to be no redemption for a fallen priest, no path upon which to step back into the light. Should this be the practice of a body of faith in a Church built upon the Blood of Christ? I must repeat, as I have done a few times in these pages, how my friend and mentor, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, described our bishops’ collective response to their fallen priests in the pages of First Things:

“Zero Tolerance. One strike. Boot them out of ministry. Of course, the victim advocates are still not satisfied, and sadly may never be satisfied. But the bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and un-Catholic approach to sin and grace ... They end up adopting a policy that is sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost anything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

— First Things, "Scandal Time III," August 2002

The trends that allowed this to happen in the U.S. Church and then spread throughout the world now lend themselves toward the demise of any priest for any cause that displeases his bishop — or even a more influential bishop in the diocese next door. Catholic League President Bill Donohue boldly addressed this in a quote on our “About” page: “There is no segment of the U.S. population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic Priest.”

Father Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL

There is a reason why false witness is included among the Ten Commandments. Its presence there is clear in Sacred Scripture: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). The Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 19, lays out the conditions under which this Commandment is to be observed: “A single witness shall not prevail against a man.” (Dt. 19:15). False witness is destructive, not only of the person who falls prey to it, but also to the entire community of believers and the justice system of an entire people.

Sometimes false witness takes the form of gross exaggeration of what otherwise might just be a slip in judgment. This is how public stoning, as a means of execution, is done today. It is not a person’s body that is stoned to death now, but a person’s good name. I fell prey to this. Standing by the truth sent me to life in prison while a simple lie would have released me a quarter century ago. And it was my own bishop (at that time) who first told the bigger lie when he declared me guilty in a press release even before jury selection in my trial.

My activism now takes the form of standing by other priests falsely accused or accused with great exaggeration which always has a specific goal: a swifter, more lucrative monetary award from a bishop anxious to settle, or some animus against the Catholic Church. Cardinal George Pell was very much an innocent victim of the latter.

Sometimes the animus comes from Catholics who blindly use The Scandal to further some agenda of their own. Father Stuart MacDonald also became a victim of grossly exaggerated false witness. It involved only an exchange of words for which he was entirely cleared of wrongdoing by the Holy See and fully restored to ministry. That should be enough for any of us, but it sadly never is for those wanting only to demean the priesthood.

As a witness in support of Father Stuart and his priesthood, I have invited him to assist Beyond These Stone Walls with his expertise in Canon Law. We have also established a Category under his name at the BTSW Public Library. Father Stuart has written several excellent posts for BTSW which are now being restored for addition to the Library. First up will be his superb and timely post, “Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” You may not recall this name, but last month, Raymond J. Donovan died. He was a member of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet who resigned forty years ago after being charged with a crime. When he was exonerated by a New York City jury, he famously asked, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

No priest should have to ask that question in a community of believers who have been offered Divine Mercy. No priest should have to claw his way back to redemption or just disappear into the night. What have we done?

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Important announcement from Father Gordon MacRae: Just days before this is posted, the Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester and my bishop has been accused of sexual abuse in the State of New York. The accusations against him are alleged to have occurred in 1983, the same year in which claims against me were also alleged to have occurred. Bishop Libasci has stated his innocence as did I. I know painfully well the great difficulty in defending against claims that are so old and brought forward with financial expectations but zero evidence or corroboration. Despite Bishop Libasci denying these accusations they may still result in his removal from ministry. Please pray for him and for a just and truthful outcome.

Please read and share these relevant posts.

Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List by Ryan A. MacDonald

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood by Ryan A. MacDonald

Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction by Fr. Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL

The Reliquary Heart of St. John Vianney, Patron of Priests

It Is the Duty of a Priest to Never Lose Sight of Heaven

Marking 40 years of priesthood, 28 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to a higher truth. For those suffering in life, eternal life matters more.

“When suffering is far away, we feel that we are ready for everything. Now that we have occasion to suffer, we must take advantage of it to save souls.”

— Fr. Maximilian Kolbe writing from Auschwitz, 1941

I am indebted to my friend, Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, for his remarkable and timely guest post, “Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In it, he concluded that some of our bishops have acted in regard to their priests by caving into the cancel culture mob even before it was called that. “The mob can be a frightening place when we have lost sight of heaven,” he boldly wrote. I was struck by this important insight which lends itself to my title for this post: It is the duty of a priest to never lose sight of heaven.

In the weeks before I mark forty years of priesthood, I have heard from no less than three good priests who have been summarily removed from ministry without a defense. Like many others, they are banished into exile following 30-year-old claims for which there exists no credible evidence beyond the accusations themselves and demands for money.

This sad reality, imposed by our bishops in a panicked response to the Catholic abuse crisis, has been the backdrop of nearly half of my life as a priest. As Father Stuart mentioned in his post, I wrote of this a decade ago in regard to the demise of the celebrated public ministry of Father John Corapi at EWTN. Given the resurgence of priests falsely accused, I decided to update and republish that post on social media. It is “Goodbye, Good Priest! Fr. John Corapi’s Kafkaesque Catch-22.”

The point of it was not Father Corapi himself, but rather the matters of due process and fundamental justice and fairness that have suffered in regard to the treatment of accused priests. In republishing it, I was struck by how little has changed in this regard since I first wrote of Father Corapi a decade earlier.

My article presents no new information on the priesthood of Father Corapi, but lest our spiritual leaders think that interest in this story among Catholics has diminished, within 24 hours of publishing, that post was visited by over 6,500 readers and shared on social media 3,700 times. (Note: We now give it a permanent home in the “Catholic Priesthood” Category at the BTSW Library.)

The only priests who land in the news these days are those accused of sexual or financial wrongdoing and those who make their disobedience to Church authority in matters of faith and morals a media event. In regard to the latter, several priests and bishops in Germany have openly defied Pope Francis and his decision to bar priests from blessing same-sex unions.

Blessing the individuals involved would not be an issue, but, as Pope Francis put it, “The Church cannot bless sin.” The open defiance of this among some German priests brought them 15 minutes of fame in our cancel culture climate in recent weeks, but it does nothing to bring us any closer to heaven.

Appearing on The World Over with Raymond Arroyo recently, Catholic theologian and author, George Weigel, addressed the German situation plainly:

“These bishops think that they know more about marriage than Jesus, that they know more about worthiness for the Eucharist than Saint Paul. This is apostasy, and it is time to call it what it really is.”

— George Weigel

The Setting for My Priesthood

In every age, people tend to see the struggles of their current time as the worst of times. My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982. It was the only ordination in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire that year. President Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term in office. The U.S. economy was suffering its most severe decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment was at its highest level in decades and the housing industry was on the verge of collapse.

Just over a year earlier, on May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times at close range as he entered Saint Peter’s Square to mark the 64th anniversary of the first appearance of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal. John Paul was severely wounded and so was the spirit of the global Catholic Church. He recovered, though a lesser man might not have.

One year later, three weeks before my ordination, Pope John Paul made a thanksgiving visit to Fatima on May 12, 1982. It was the day before the anniversary of both the Visions of Fatima and the attempt on his life. As the Pope walked toward the altar of the Fatima shrine, a man in clerical garb lunged at him with a bayonet, coming within inches of killing John Paul before being subdued by security guards.

The assailant was Juan Fernandez y Krohn, then age 32, a priest ordained by the suspended traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Fernandez was subsequently expelled from Lefebvre's movement. As he lunged at the Pope with his bayonet, he shouted in denouncement of the Second Vatican Council while accusing Pope John Paul of collaborating with the dark forces behind the spread of Communism.

That latter accusation was highly ironic. Over the next decade, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II collaborated to become the two major forces behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism that had held the Western World in the grip of Cold War since the end of World War II.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down by a crowd of citizens from both East and West as soldiers watched in silence. On Christmas Day, 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a television address. The next day, the Soviet parliament passed its final resolution ratifying the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Within a week, all residual functions of the Soviet Communist state ceased. The USSR was no more, thanks to the strength and fidelity of a Pope and a President.

The footprints of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul on modern human history are immense. This and the chaos of the world at that time formed the backdrop against which I became a priest in 1982. I wrote of this in “Priesthood: The Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times.”

The sins of the times were many. On the world stage, Pope John Paul courageously confronted the Marxist “cancel culture” movement of his time. His bold witness to the world and his fidelity are highlighted in a new and important book by George Weigel entitled Not Forgotten.

In contrast, much of the current Catholic ecclesial leadership seems bogged down in demonstrations of tolerance for dissent and the rise of socialism and Marxist ideology that again springs up anew as “cancel culture.” Some bishops cannot even decide whether open promotion of abortion should bar its adherents who are nominally Catholic from presenting themselves for the Eucharist. 

Ironically, recent polls have suggested that 66-percent of American Catholics are uncertain whether they still even believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is that exact same percentage who also believe that President Biden should be admitted to the Eucharist without question despite his open promotion of abortion as a civil right. Our Catholic crisis is not just one of fidelity. It is a crisis of identity. But as has been famously asked by another well-known priest, “Who am I to judge?”

Witnessed in a Prison Journal

Now here I stand, 39 years into my priesthood on the peripheries with 27 of those years in wrongful imprisonment for abuse claims that never took place. I could have left prison 26 years ago had the truth meant nothing to me. I have been reading the far better known story of another falsely accused priest in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell published by Ignatius Press.

I find in it much solace and peace. I am strengthened in my priesthood by the great effort of Cardinal Pell to maintain his identity as a priest even in prison. I know from long experience - too long - that there is nothing in prison, absolutely nothing that sustains an identity of priesthood. It is so easy and a constant temptation to simply give up. For page after page in the Journal, I find myself thinking, “I felt that very same way,” or “I did these very same things.” Our prisons were similar, although from Cardinal Pell descriptions, Australia’s prisons seem a bit more humane.

Cardinal Pell was in prison for 400 days before his unjust convictions were recognized as such in a unanimous exoneration by Australia’s High Court. On my 39th anniversary of ordination on June 5th this year, I mark 9,750 days in wrongful imprisonment. I do not point this out to contrast my experience with that of Cardinal Pell. His ordeal, like mine, was defined by his first failed appeals after which he had every reason to believe that prison could thus define the rest of his life.

I have no known recourse because, unlike Australia, the United States courts have given greater weight to states’ rights to finality in criminal cases than to innocent defendants’ rights to a case review. When I had new witnesses and evidence, the court not only declined to hear it, but declined to allow any further appeals. We even appealed that, but to no avail.

But a distinction between justice for Cardinal Pell and for me is not the point I want to make. I felt the lacerations to his good name in every step of his Way of the Cross as news media in Australia and globally exploited the charges against him. What a trophy his wrongful conviction was for those who hate the Church!

I felt the scourging he endured as multiple false claimants tried to use his cross for financial gain. I felt his condemnation in the halls of the high priests as cowardly men of the Church denounced him, at worst, or at best stood speechless in the shadows of silence, rarely mentioning his name, and even then only in whispers.

Reading Volume One of Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal has been both consoling and distressing. Consoling in that when all else was stripped away, truth and priesthood, even more than freedom, were still at the heart of this good priest’s identity. The measure of a man is not when all is going well, but when all that is dear and familiar has been stripped away. Cardinal Pell held up well. I like to think I have, too.

I have reserved a copy of Volume Two of the Prison Journal. I am told by those who know that in a few of its pages, Cardinal Pell also wrote about me. That struck me as highly ironic in that I wrote several times about his plight, the last being “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

And by “From Down Under,” I do not just mean Australia!

The Last Years of My Priesthood

I expect that I will die in prison. This is not a statement out of despair. No one has taken my faith in Divine Providence and Divine Mercy. There came a time in my imprisonment when I recognized a pattern of grace that began with the insinuation of Saint Maximilian Kolbe into my life as both a priest and a prisoner. This grace has been profound, and staggering in its visibility and power. Our readers — all but the most spiritually blind — have seen it.

After a lifetime of devoting himself as a priest in Consecration to Jesus through Mary, Maximilian coped with his suffering as grace rather than torment. This story culminated, as you know, in his spontaneous decision to surrender his life so that another could live. This act of sacrifice has long been heralded as an exemplar of the words of Jesus, “No greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

There came a point in my imprisonment when it was clear that all I tried to do to bring about justice was in vain. So I asked for Divine Mercy and the ability to find grace in this story. A life without grace is far worse than a life without justice. It was at that very point at which my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, arrived upon my road as a priest. He had been mercilessly beaten down in life, and robbed of all trust and hope.

I could have been the priest who saw him on that road and passed him by like the priest in the Parable of the Samaritan. But I stopped, and when I learned the whole truth of his life, I set my own hope for justice aside. It became clear to me that this was God’s action in my life and a task that He has given only to me. It became clear that Pornchai has a special connection to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and I was to be his Saint Joseph.

I wrote a post about this healing mission which I contrasted with the Book of Tobit and the mission of Saint Raphael the Archangel to be God’s instrument of healing. I wrote of this in one of my own favorite posts at Beyond These Stone Walls in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”

You should not miss that post, and if you do read it, you would do well to ponder for awhile the mysteries of grace on your own life’s path. It was well after writing and posting it that I learned something that stunned me into a better awareness of the irony of grace.

Over the course of time, the Church has devised a Lectionary that reveals all of Sacred Scripture in the readings for the Church’s liturgy spread over a three-year cycle. I discovered only while writing this post for the occasion of my 39th anniversary of priesthood ordination that the First Reading at Mass on that day — Saturday, June 5, 2021 — is the story of the Archangel Raphael sent by God to restore life and sight to Tobit and bring deliverance and healing to two souls — Tobias and Sarah — whose lives and sufferings converged upon Tobit’s at that point in time.

As I mark thirty nine years as a priest in extraordinary circumstances, the weight of imprisonment does not leave me broken. But the irony of grace leaves me hopeful — even now.

Thank you for being a part of my life as a priest. Thank you for being here with me at this turning of the tide.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We have a most important message for readers. Please visit our “Special Events” page.

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You may also like these related posts:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of Cardinal George Pell

Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

Seven judges of the Australia Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Cardinal George Pell was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. He and we deserve to know how and why.

Strange things had been happening in the weeks leading up to Holy Week 2020. For the first time in our lifetimes, Catholic churches were inaccessible to most Catholics observing Holy Week and Easter as a community of believers.

Then, in the midst of all the church closures due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, Cyrus Habib, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Washington State, announced that he is leaving politics to study for the Catholic priesthood. This was not the sort of hopeful news the news media likes to hype in Holy Week so it was barely noticed. Then the Supreme Court of Australia announced that, on Tuesday of Holy Week, it would release its decision on the final hope for appeal in the case of Cardinal George Pell.

I did not greet this news with a sense of hope. Far back in April of 2010, I wrote a post with the controversial title, “Breaking News: I Got Stoned with the Pope.” It was about how some consistently anti-Catholic news outlets have a tradition of exploiting Catholic scandal during or just prior to Holy Week.

The pope in question back then was Benedict XVI. For full disclosure, neither he nor I inhaled anything illicit. That was not what I meant by getting stoned with the pope. It was meant in the Biblical sense, the same sense found in one of the most popular posts on These Stone Walls, “Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote in the Sand.”

The type of stoning that brutally took a person’s life in Biblical times is carried out today in another way. Instead of taking a life, a person’s reputation is destroyed. False witness and sensational headlines are now the stones of choice. We have all seen the “gotcha” media at work. You cannot sit through a White House press conference without witnessing firsthand how some in the news media insinuate, inflame, and then exploit the interpretations that too often today pass for real journalism.

A vivid example came during the 2016 Presidential election cycle. A group of 200 noisy white supremacists demonstrated in Virginia using slogans such as “Make America Great Again.” For much of the far left mainstream news media, this was evidence enough to link them with Donald Trump implying falsely that he must support racism because some racists support him.

The real scandal is the news media itself. By giving these marginal racists a spotlight, the news media took their tiny microphone and turned it into a national megaphone. The news media does not even try to justify its viral coverage of 200 white supremacists while turning a blind eye to 200,000 prolife advocates at the annual March for Life in Washington DC.

I admit that I was cynical and suspicious when I learned that the High Court of Australia chose Tuesday of Holy Week to announce its long awaited final verdict on Cardinal Pell. As soon as the decision was announced, victim groups and some in the media went into high gear to denounce the finding and declare that it is not an exoneration or acquittal.

This is nonsense. The unanimous finding that Cardinal Pell’s charges were fatally flawed, his trial unjust, his convictions unsupported by evidence, are in fact an exoneration. He stands convicted of no crime. It exposed for all the world to see the harsh reality that — as for so many other priests facing the cruel tyranny of false witness in the current age — Cardinal Pell was considered guilty merely for being accused.

The Integrity of Justice Itself Is at Stake

Four hundred and five days! That is how long 78-year-old George Cardinal Pell spent in prison before Australian justice woke up. On the day of his exoneration, I marked 9,350 days of wrongful imprisonment. I do not write that as a comparison, but rather as an expression of deepest empathy for what Cardinal Pell endured.

Throughout his ordeal, I believed in his innocence; I supported him with my prayers, and I offered some of my own unjust imprisonment in spiritual alliance with him. I hope this was evident in my series of widely-read posts about his plight that I will link at the end of this one. When I say that those end posts were widely read, the truth is that they were widely read everywhere but in Australia.

The first of these posts was “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia.” Its focus was on the fact that the whole world was watching these charges as they proceeded to trial with no real evidence and much media exploitation. In the end, it is Australia’s justice system that now seems indicted and facing trial in the court of public opinion.

I hope this exoneration brings some much-needed soul searching to the people of Australia, the Australian courts, and the police and prosecutors who ignored much exculpatory evidence to bring these charges. However, evidence for that soul-searching was not reflected in the public statement of Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria State where Cardinal Pell was convicted.

After the unanimous Supreme Court exoneration, the public statement of the Victoria State Premier addressed none of what the Court covered or decided. He instead addressed himself to what the media calls victims and survivors but what the legal system must treat as accusers. His statement to them was: “I see you. I hear you. I believe you.”

On its face, that seems benign, but it isn’t. It is perhaps the most dangerous affront to justice in a case like this. It is grotesquely irresponsible to reduce the application of justice to a set of hashtags instead of evidence. Why have courts and trials at all if the personal beliefs of police, prosecutors and state officials are all that is needed to convict and condemn?

In the United States, the Center for Prosecutor Integrity has joined over 100 legal scholars in a petition to the department of Justice to cease its support for #BelieveSurvivors and guilt-presuming investigations. It is one of the most prolific causes of wrongful convictions and other injustices. When police and prosecutors — and the governments on whose behalf they operate — launch “Victim-Centered Investigations” they begin with a faulty assumption that crimes did occur and that the accused is guilty.

The Prosecutor Integrity website lists hundreds of scholarly articles by legal experts about how innocent defendants like Cardinal Pell are victimized by investigators wearing blinders. Police and prosecutor misconduct were central factors in 42-percent of wrongful convictions. One article at the Wrongful Convictions site is “The Intersection Between Innocence, Expert Witness and Religion: The Case of Rev. Gordon MacRae.”

Victim-Centered instead of fact-centered investigations result in a failure of the justice system to look honestly at itself. The Australian police and prosecutors — and the two judges who upheld a guilty verdict against Cardinal Pell in his first appeal — have some explaining to do.

I know only too well what the trashing of Cardinal Pell’s good name has cost him, but the other damage is to the integrity of the criminal justice system. I also know well the treachery of those — both inside and outside the Church — who disregard a lack of evidence or substantiation, mindlessly poised to believe any lurid tale regarding any priest so accused.

On social media after this exoneration, some in Australia suggested that, innocent or not, Cardinal Pell should have remained in prison in reparation for the sins of other priests. This is nothing more than evidence of the moral panic this story set in motion. It is easy to offer up someone else’s good name and freedom for a politically correct cause.

Minds should not be made up because the media celebrates the fall of Catholic priests and prelates. Minds should be made up by clear and compelling evidence, and there was none. Anything less is to surrender our own personal integrity to the news media and to reduce justice to a lynch mob.

Priestly Scandal: A Pandemic of Trophy Justice

Accusations against a high profile cardinal and member of the curia too easily result in “Trophy Justice,” a term that also has grave implications for the integrity of the justice system. Cardinal Pell spent 405 days in prison because those empowered to impart justice were too reluctant to give up their trophy.

Since his exoneration there has been no shortage of biased treatment in the news. The much needed voice of Bill Donohue at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has been, as usual, on the front lines exposing this.  Annual membership in the Catholic League is the best $30 investment I have ever made.

Ironically, in the wake of this exoneration, editorials in The New York Times and The Boston Globe have criticized a lack of transparency in the Australian justice system. Bill Donohue rightly pointed out that neither newspaper ever questioned its transparency when Cardinal Pell was found guilty without evidence, or when he was sentenced to prison, or when a lower court disregarded the shoddy work of prosecutors to uphold an unjust verdict. That was all perfectly transparent.

And it was all front page news. The exoneration did not at all receive anything even close to equal treatment. I am thankful to Bill Donohue for informing us that The Boston Globe  reported Cardinal Pell’s exoneration on page 19. Why any thinking, reasonable Catholic is still reading The New York Times  or The Boston Globe  is a mystery. There are alternatives. In ten years of writing behind These Stone Walls, I have never seen anti-Catholic bias and media distortion in The Wall Street Journal.

I am ashamed to add to the above that some Catholic media have fared little better. After Cardinal Pell’s first appeal to a lower court failed in a two-to-one decision, Our Sunday Visitor  reported in its news section that his conviction was upheld by a three-judge panel. In a letter of protest to the editors, I pointed out that this was inaccurate and misleading.

Judge Weinberg the most experienced judge on that Australian three-judge panel, published a blistering dissent against the conclusions of the other two, but Our Sunday Visitor  did not publish my letter clarifying this. After Cardinal Pell spent another six months unjustly in prison, the seven judges of Australia’s Supreme Court agreed with Judge Weinberg’s dissent.

Why should we support obviously biased or agenda-driven news outlets? When we know the truth behind a mishandled story, logic requires that we ask how many other stories are misrepresented in the news without our awareness. The Catholic League has never retreated from reporting on the crisis in the Church without sacrificing the rights of priests. In the March 2020 issue of Catalyst, just weeks before the exoneration of Cardinal Pell, Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote of both our cases:

“Cardinal George Pell, who is in an Australian prison for alleged sexual abuse (awaiting a final appeal) was accused as far back as 1962. The case was dismissed because nothing could be substantiated. His accuser had been convicted 39 times for offenses ranging from assault to drug use. He was a violent drug addict…. There is another priest, Father Gordon MacRae, who is still in prison in New Hampshire for crimes he vehemently denies, and whose accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. Even his former wife and stepson call him a compulsive liar and manipulator.”

— Catalyst, Accused Priests Deserve Better

Pope John Paul II once cautioned that the Church must be a mirror of justice to the world. The mirror of justice has since cracked, however, when the American bishops adopted merely “credible” as sufficient evidence to discredit and discard a priest, and then pressed Rome to apply that standard throughout the Church. The result is the treatment that we have just witnessed in the case of Cardinal Pell.

Too many in the media — sadly including some in the Catholic media — simply presumed his guilt just as they presume the guilt of most priests so accused. But there were other, even darker agendas at work in the case of Cardinal Pell, and real transparency will require getting to the bottom of them.

Some in Rome, convinced of his innocence, remained silent while others may have been complicit with getting Cardinal Pell and his financial reforms out of the way. It has been suggested recently by Paul Kelly, an Australian political commentator for The Australian, that “State power had been recruited in an effort to destroy Pell.”

Cardinal Pell was a scapegoat who was targeted by enemies of the Church — enemies perhaps both foreign and domestic. Pope Francis had been careful to withhold any public statement until the Cardinal Pell case had exhausted all appeals. On Tuesday of Holy Week, just hours after Cardinal Pell’s release from prison, Pope Francis released this remarkable statement via Twitter:

“In these days of Lent, we have been witnessing the persecution that Jesus underwent and how He was judged ferociously, even though He was innocent. Let us pray together today for all those persons who suffer due to an unjust sentence because someone had it in for them.”

— Pope Francis

Someone had it in for Cardinal Pell. He and we deserve to know who and why. And as for Pope Francis, his summation sure sounds like an exoneration to me.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please pray for Cardinal Pell, for his restoration from this years-long ordeal, and for a just and honest reckoning about the process that brought it about. You may also wish to read this related post:

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?

Striking similarities exist between claims of Cardinal George Pell’s accuser and those in a discredited case hyped by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in Rolling Stone magazine.

Back in 2016, before the American presidential election that shook our politics, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was quoted in a NewsMax article entitled “Trump Taps into Mass Distrust.” Dr. Donohue, who happens to be a well-published sociologist, cited a poll by the Media Insight Project and the American Press Institute that measured the confidence voters have in American institutions.

Topping the list of those earning the public’s trust were, in order: The U.S. military, the scientific community, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized religion (yes, even still!), and America’s financial institutions. At the bottom of the list were the institutions Americans trust least. The last two came as no surprise. Only six percent of Americans reported having trust in the news media. Only four percent reported having trust in members of Congress.

Bill Donohue also cited another study. In 1985, a Pew Research Center poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans trust the news media to report facts truthfully. By 2011, that figure dropped to 25 percent. In the same poll in 1985, 45 percent of Americans thought the media was biased. By 2011, it jumped to 63 percent.

Bill Donohue gleaned from the fine print of these polls that the two most cited reasons for wide-spread mistrust of news media were inaccurate reporting and media bias. There is another reason, but it may not be so evident to casual consumers of the news. The media has abandoned skepticism in favor of quick and easy “gotcha” news.

The most articulate analysis of media bias comes from journalist JoAnn Wypijewski in a news-busting CounterPunch article about the Catholic priesthood scandal. Her against-the-tide article is “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film” (For full disclosure my own charges are examined therein).

“I don’t believe the personal injury lawyers … I don’t believe the prosecutors who pursued tainted cases, or the therapists who revived junk science or the juries that sided with them or the judges who failed to act justly or the people who made money off any of this …

“I don’t believe the claims of all who say they are victims or who prefer the tough-minded label, survivor — because ready belief is not part of a journalist’s mental kit, but also because what happened in 2002 makes it difficult to distinguish real claims from fraudulent or opportunistic ones without independent research.”

This article would never win recognition for public service from the news media because it goes so vividly against the current tide of political correctness. The news media has abandoned the necessary skepticism that was once “part of a journalist’s mental kit.” To be merely accused today is to be guilty.

Manipulating the Court of Public Opinion

This, says JoAnn Wypijewski, is “the legacy of the courtroom of panic that made ‘the pedophile priest’ a cultural bogeyman, a devil, who need not be real but only named to light the fires of wrath.” I became a target of that courtroom of panic and those fires of wrath, and so, it now seems, did Cardinal George Pell.

In a time of moral panic, convictions happen in the public eye long before they happen in a court of law. For many prosecutors, arriving at the truth is now less important than winning. The necessary “independent research” cited by Ms. Wypijewski happens only when the smoke of an unjust trial clears, if at all.

The case against Cardinal Pell had already raised concerns for real justice even before it ended in a courtroom. One of the best commentaries on this has come from David F. Pierre, Jr., host of The Media Report, in “The Witch Hunt Against Australia’s Cardinal George Pell: Five Facts You Need to Know.” The five facts summarized by David Pierre are these:

• The Australian government began investigating Cardinal Pell over five years ago even though there had been no crime reported against him.

• Pell’s publicly known accusers include career criminals, admitted drug addicts, and others who have lodged similar complaints before.

• Even secular observers have admitted that Pell was not treated fairly.

• Accusations against Pell were widely circulated in a 2017 book that has been thoroughly discredited.

• Cardinal Pell vehemently and consistently denies the accusations against him.

Before the trial, some of the charges were withdrawn by prosecutors. Now there is a new source of grave doubt about the justice meted out to Cardinal Pell. An alert reader of These Stone Walls  first spotted this story in an account at LifeSite News by Dorothy Cummings McLean entitled, “Cardinal Pell’s Accuser Copied Testimony from Old Rolling Stone Report, Journalist Claims.”

The writer who first uncovered this is Keith Windschuttle, an Australian journalist and historian. He used the professional skepticism and deep-sourcing that were once mainstays of the news media but have sadly been abandoned in favor of quick sound bites and the strip-mining of news.

Mr. Windschuttle discovered some eerie similarities between the claims brought against Cardinal Pell and a lurid story of abuse by American Catholic priests that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in 2011. His findings listed a series of identical, sometimes verbatim, allegations seemingly lifted from the pages of Rolling Stone.

The magazine and that article would have been readily available to Pell’s accuser when he first described his “abuse” to police in 2015. The LifeSite News  summary of the article lists the similarities, and they leave little doubt, according to Windschuttle:

“What is the difference between this account of child sex abuse in a Catholic church in Philadelphia and the evidence given by a sole accuser in the Victorian [AU] court case that convicted Cardinal George Pell? … Not much. The two stories were so close to being identical that the likelihood of the Australian version being original is most implausible. There were too many similarities for the likeness to be dismissed as ‘coincidence.’”

Sabrina Rubin Erdely & the Predatory News Media

You may read for yourselves in the LifeSite News  article the striking similarities that raise a specter of plagiarism in the charges against Cardinal Pell. The 2011 Rolling Stone article from which Pell’s accuser seems to have copied his claims was “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” written by a now disgraced and discredited former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Readers may remember that name from “A Rape on Campus,” an explosive story in the November 2014 issue of Rolling Stone. Sabrina Rubin Erdely profiled the story of “Jackie,” a student at the University of Virginia who claimed to be a victim of gang rape at a UVA fraternity party in 2012.  Rolling Stone’s front page cried out:

“A RAPE ON CAMPUS: Jackie was just starting her freshman year at the University of Virginia when she was brutally assaulted by seven men at a frat party. When she tried to hold them accountable, a whole new kind of abuse began.”

Erdely’s account depicted UVA administrators as having callous disregard for the pain and suffering of the anonymous “Jackie” and, by extension, for the plight of other victims of sexual assault on campus. The story helped launch a national debate about rape on college campuses across the nation.

It contributed to a moral panic that went all the way to the Obama White House where legislation was promoted to drastically curtail the due process rights of accused college students. In the fallout from the story, UVA administrators called for resignations and expulsions even before all the facts were in. Like most such media events, the story was accepted as Gospel truth once it appeared in print.

But then someone began to do some of the independent research that journalist JoAnn Wypijewski calls for above. “Jackie’s” account turned out to be a massive lie, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s coverage of it a massive betrayal of journalistic standards. No one could corroborate any of “Jackie’s” story and Erdely never even bothered to try. She did no fact checking. She just ran with the story, riding a wave of public hysteria about sexual assault and abuse.

A civil trial took place just before the 2016 presidential election. From the witness stand, Sabrina Rubin Erdely cited the same tactic that countless contingency lawyers have used against the Catholic Church: “It takes trauma victims some time to come forward with all the details,” she testified to excuse her disregard for journalistic standards.

“It is not unusual,” Erdely testified to explain away “Jackie’s” ever-changing details of her story. In the end, with streaming tears, Erdely blamed it all on “Jackie,” saying, “It was a mistake to rely on someone whose intent was to deceive me.”

The bar for proving defamation and negligence against a journalist is steep. A jury must conclude, as it did in this case, that a journalist or media venue published what it knew to be false, or did so with reckless disregard for truth. In the end, when the entire account was heard, a jury found Rolling Stone  guilty of negligence and defamation, and imposed a $7.5 million dollar jury award to the falsely accused fraternity students.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely was found liable for actual malice in the writing and publication of this story. By the December 2016 edition of Rolling Stone, her name was removed from the masthead of contributing editors, and she disappeared from the world of journalism.

That Lying Scheming Altar Boy Again!

But there is another reason readers of these pages may recall Ms Erdely and Rolling Stone. A news media in pursuit of the whole truth instead of its own agenda would have scoured Ms Erdely’s previous work, but they did not. They did not because doing so would have required delving into another story by Ms Erdely that raises the same hard questions. It is a story that I have written about in multiple posts, including “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”

Three years before “A Rape on Campus,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone  launched another moral panic by exploding a story of a Pennsylvania Catholic sex-abuse ring among priests in “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files.” It is a story, as I have written elsewhere in These Stone Walls, that turned Father Charles Engelhardt into a martyr and Daniel Gallagher into a millionaire.

And lest you have questions about media influence on judges, Father Engelhardt’s judge, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, objected to a defense question posed to jurors:

“Anybody that doesn’t think there is widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is living on another planet.”

Before falling for “Jackie’s” fraud, Ms. Erdely fell for a much larger one brought by Daniel Gallagher, assured anonymity by Ms. Erdely as “Billy Doe” in the pages of Rolling Stone. It is this story, and Rolling Stone’s presentation of it, that is now the apparent source of copycat testimony in the case against Cardinal George Pell.

But, like Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus,” this story was also a fraud. It was written with the same malice and disregard for truth as Erdely’s other story, but it nonetheless launched a witch hunt in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with tentacles extending into the present day. Now it seems that some of those tentacles washed up in Australia as well.

The facts in this story are staggering, and though I have written extensively of them, the best source for a succinct summary is by journalist Ralph Cipriano writing for the January-February issue of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst in “The Legacy of Billy Doe.”

It is ironic that Cardinal Pell’s accuser picked this story to serve as a model to concoct false charges. Of course, this happened long before the story of Daniel Gallagher was exposed as a fraud. Up until last year it was a great success for the newly minted millionaire, Daniel Gallagher, who is yet to be brought to justice because it would be greatly embarrassing for Pennsylvania justice officials to do so.

I highly recommend Ralph Cipriano’s “The Legacy of Billy Doe.” In only two pages, he blew apart the narrative that has prevailed in the media to date. It is a narrative that now raises questions about the character of the case against Cardinal Pell as well. We owe it to him to make this known. There is a reason why no other news media figure has taken up this story as Mr. Cipriano has, and as I have here at These Stone Walls.

And it is a frightening reason, frightening for anyone concerned with the integrity of our news media and the tyranny it can create through false witness. No one has articulated this better than The Wall Street Journal' s Pulitzer Prize-winning expositor of truth in justice, Dorothy Rabinowitz, in her 2005 book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the progressive views held by many toward crimes involving special categories of victims like women and children. [T]here [is] a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse charges was to undermine the battle. It was to betray all other victims of sexual predators. Where advanced reasoning of this sort prevailed, the facts of a case were simply irrelevant.”

— No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 17-18

And that, my friends — for anyone who has counted on the news media to champion truth and justice — may be the cruelest tyranny of all.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please help share this story with others. I believe we owe that much to Cardinal Pell.

Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia

The trial of Cardinal George Pell for “historic” sexual abuse claims is underway in Australia, but the state of Australian justice also has the world’s attention.

“Why have a trial at all? Just take the man into the Outback and shoot him.”

“Trial by Media.” The ominous term has already been a part of the public record in regard to Australia’s Cardinal George Pell. I used the term myself in a post two years ago entitled, “Peter Saunders and Cardinal Pell: A Trial by Media.”

The concern for the poisoning of justice through leaks to a toxic and predatory news media is nothing new, but “Trial by Media” hangs like the burial shroud of justice itself over the trial of Cardinal Pell on 40-year-old claims of sexual abuse.

Lest anyone doubt the power of the media to both generate such claims and shape justice and due process in a case like this, consider a recent issue of The Week, a popular weekly news magazine.  The Week  presents itself as “The Best of the U.S. and International Media.” It selects excerpts from online media and newspapers throughout the world and presents them as the best written accounts of the week’s top stories.

In its July 21, 2017 issue, The Week chose as the best of the media from Australia a column by Barney Zwartz in The Age entitled, “The Nation’s Top Catholic in the Dock.” It should raise the alarm for anyone concerned for the media’s role in all this, and the slant it presents. Here is an excerpt:

“After decades of rumors, Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, is finally facing trial for child sexual abuse. At this point, Australians are numb to the horror, having endured years of parliamentary reports that produced damning evidence against so many priests…”

We can only hope that Australians are not so “numb” that they don’t see through this language. It is an open invitation to a lynch mob. The phrase, “after decades of rumors” should alarm everyone from the start. For any objective observer of this story, the only “damning evidence” is the accusations themselves and the fact that there has been a sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Australia.

This is the state of the evidence thus far presented against Cardinal Pell as this “Trial by Media” gets underway. To incite a community to forego due process in favor of emotion is the very foundation of all witch hunts. An “availability bias” has been built that places Catholic priests in a suspect class. I described its momentum in “How SNAP Brought McCarthyism to American Catholics.”

Conditioned by a predatory media, Australians are now invited to ignore the abyss that is empty of evidence, and weigh the claims against Cardinal Pell with nothing of substance except “decades of rumors” that left Australians “numb to the horror.” The same media-fueled moral panic swept America and spread like a virus.

Now some of those who used it for profit are themselves before the bar of justice — (See “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme”). But Mr. Zwartz and The Week  present other “evidence” as well, and it is a central but unspoken feature in the indictment of Cardinal Pell:

“A combative participant in Australia’s culture wars,” the ultraconservative Pell had long been a divisive figure in Australia because of his `relentless, overbearing’ style. He was ruthless in punishing priests who deviated from doctrine by advocating changes to Mass or supporting ordination of women.”

Actual evidence of any offense from forty years ago does not exist in the Pell case, but for too many about the business of news and fake news, it need not exist. His Eminence is guilty of “other things”: fidelity to Catholic teaching, a conservative mindset, and an insistence that priests support orthodoxy. This is enough for the Trial by Media to rush to judgment.

Whether it is enough for the people of Australia remains to be seen. I think not. Even after my own experience of justice, I remain open to the hope that the better nature of thoughtful people will prevail. I know many Australians, and they are neither unjust nor “numb” as some in the news media suggest.

Where Are Your Accusers? (John 8:10)

Who are the current accusers in the trial of Cardinal Pell? It strikes me as bizarre that so many in the news media have focused this story only on the wider scandal and Cardinal Pell’s conservative mindset without much inquiry into the rest of the equation. Most in the media have said nothing about Pell’s accusers except to freely identify them as “victims,” and to insinuate that unnamed others contemplate coming forward.

There’s just enough smoke to create the impression of a raging fire Down Under. On June 30, The Media Report, an ever vigilant source of the rest of the sobering story, posted “Now This: The Media’s Cardinal Pell Disinformation Campaign.”

David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report  focused on a sobering fact that most other reports have omitted or downplayed. These accusations are from forty years ago. Much of the news media will not identify the accusers because of politically correct policies to withhold the identities of sexual abuse victims, but these accusers are not children; they are men in their fifties.

They have criminal records of their own. Although that in itself does not discredit their claims, it should be sufficient enough for a closer look.  The Media Report  pointed out (with supportive links) that one of the accusers, Lyndon Monument, is an “admitted drug addict” who served a term in prison for criminal assault stemming from a drug debt. He also previously accused a childhood teacher of sexual abuse.

The other accuser, Damian Dignan, “has a criminal history for assault and drunk driving.” He has a history of alcohol abuse, and also previously accused a childhood teacher of assault. Both men are raising their claims against Cardinal Pell for the first time, forty years later, and only when the climate would lend itself to less scrutiny over financial settlements.

Experience tells me that both the justice system and the news media should be especially cautious in forming judgments in such a case. In 2005, during the height of the priesthood scandal in America, I wrote an article for Catalyst entitled “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud.”

The article details multiple cases of men with criminal records who concocted schemes to obtain financial settlements through fraudulent claims about Catholic priests. They took advantage of the very climate now smoldering behind the Pell case.

Then there was the story of Shamont Lyle Sapp that I exposed in “Catholic Priests and the Perversions of Predators.” Before he was investigated and exposed by a vigilant U.S. Attorney, Mr. Sapp, from his prison cell, accused several priests in multiple states using details and “evidence” gathered from Internet accounts of other accusations against priests. It was only a fluke that Sapp was investigated and caught in the scam.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Media Report  also reminded us that back in 2002, Cardinal Pell was previously accused by a “career criminal” who had been convicted of tax evasion, narcotics charges, illegal gambling operations, and organized crime with “an impressive 39 court convictions under his belt.” He accused Cardinal Pell of abusing him in 1962, but Pell was exonerated and cleared of the charge.

“Cardinal George Pell and Other Martyrs for a Nefarious Cause” raised the specter that claims like these 40-year-old charges are used by some as “weapons of mass destruction” in order to bolster other agendas. At the popular site, Whispers in the Loggia (“For the Cardinal Prefect, ‘My Day in Court’” June 29), Rocco Palmo raised the same “historical” abuse case from the 1960s in which Pell had been cleared, but he attributed its momentum, and its treatment in Rome, to other agendas:

“Two decades of revelations of abuse and cover-up have been treated as a political football among the Church’s ideological camps.”

There is no evidence or reason for treating the current forty-year-old “historical abuse” case as any different. The mere fact that charges were brought in such a case could have a lot more to do with Pell being a target for political factions that are happy to see him in the dock of justice knowing that, regardless of the outcome, Pell is permanently maligned and out of the way.

But among all the toxic press, there are many sounding the alarm that “Trial by Media” in Australia is itself facing trial. In National Review  (“The Persecution of Cardinal George Pell,” June 29, 2017) author George Weigel described the campaign against Pell in Australia as…

“…a thoroughly poisonous public climate exacerbated by poorly sourced but widely disseminated allegations, no respect for elementary fairness, and a curious relationship between elements of the Australian media and the Victoria police…”

George Weigel cited comments from several Australians who have refused to become caught up in the climate of moral panic and nefarious agendas. These voices are worth hearing out. Attorney Robin Speed, President of the Australian Rule of Law Institute warned against prosecutors acting against Pell “in response to the baying of a section of the mob.”

Angela Shanahan in The Australian  summarized the trajectory of the case:

“Conspiracy and rumor reign, logic and fact have gone out the window in the case of Cardinal Pell…. In all this sound and fury, the Cardinal has acted impeccably. He has said nothing except to state his innocence.”

Columnist Peter Craven, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (June 9) concluded,

“One can only hope to God that in the present climate people will be capable of realizing this is a case being mounted for a witch trial”

Voices of dissent against the blind orthodoxy of victimhood are a minority in Australia just as they are a minority in America. Some of these voices have been courageous in their defense, not only of Cardinal Pell, but of justice as an ideal that is now itself under indictment. Australian political commentator Amanda Vanstone, a former Ambassador to Italy and “no fan of organized religion,” wrote,

“George Pell’s trial by media has to stop. What we are seeing is no better than a lynch mob from the dark ages… The public arena is being used to trash a reputation and probably prevent a fair trial.”

Andrew Halphen, co-chairman of criminal law at the Law Institute of Victoria addressed the leaks to the media about Pell as a startling affront to the legal system. He expressed grave concern over whether Pell could now have a fair trial. He added that he could not think of any other case in which a charge against a public figure “finds its way to the front page of a major news publication before a person is actually charged.”

After I posted “Cardinal George Pell and Other Martyrs for a Nefarious Cause,” a first-time reader in Ballarat, Australia sent a comment that I want to post here because it speaks volumes about the climate in which Cardinal Pell faces trial. It begins with a quote from the above post:

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“‘This nonsense continues because of the clamor of a few and the silence of many.’ Ahh, the irony of your comment. I am a Ballarat resident. My childhood bore witness to the culture of pedophilia that thrived here. And as an adult, the impact of the sexual abuse that happened to so many in my community continues.

“I am appalled by your lack of compassion for victims. Your want to dismiss the validity of these crimes because of the delay in victims coming forward and/or charges laid, and your implied belief that our Australian justice system is flawed.

“Our community knows its truths. The Catholic Church cannot conceal this truth as it once did. Your comments are just “clamor.” Hurtful clamor. Pell and the rest of “your fellow sufferers” [quoted from Cardinal Avery Dulles on TSW’s “About” page] cannot demand the silence of so many impacted because it doesn’t fit your narrative.”

— a resident of Ballarat, Australia

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The defense rests its case. My heart goes out to Australians who have suffered the unspeakable, but the above comment makes the case for me. If what other priests did to other victims is now sufficient “evidence” to indict and convict Cardinal Pell then why have a trial at all? If it is too late to salvage justice from vengeance, then just take the man into the Outback and shoot him.