Month: Feb 2019

This is the story of two teenage boys sent on scholarships from what were then Melbourne’s inner suburbs to a Catholic boys’ school – St Kevin’s College. St Kevin’s is in Toorak, Melbourne’s most exclusive precinct.
The school is wedged between the Kooyong Tennis Club and the Yarra River, and closed behind grand iron gates with gilded lettering. The boys wear boater hats and navy blazers, candy-striped with emerald and gold. While the area the boys came from has now gentrified, in the 1990s it might as well have been a different planet.
I’m not at liberty to name the boys – complainants of sexual assault and their families have a legal right to anonymity and it has been requested here. I’ve called them The Kid and The Choirboy.
The boys got their ticket to St Kevin’s because they could sing. The choirmaster from St Patrick’s Cathedral had sent scouts to the Catholic primary schools around Melbourne’s suburbs to find boys on the cusp of puberty who had the voices of angels. In return for their vocal skills, the boys received choral scholarships to St Kevin’s.
When The Kid remembers it, he has tears in his eyes.

“It was a dream of my mum and I, that I could go to this incredible private school that we could never afford, she was so proud,” he says.
The Choirboy’s mum, whom I’ll call Mary, had no idea her boy had this talent.
“But it was good, you know?” Mary says, smiling at the memory. “A nice scholarship for a good education.”
It was to be a big commitment for the families but the boys were very enthusiastic. The working parents carpooled to help with the commute. The Choirboy threw himself into his new role as he did everything in life.
“Oh my god, everything had to be done yesterday,” Mary laughs. “[He] would disappear from sun-up to sundown … He was just gung ho, you know?”
Weekends were filled with song. The choristers were expected to sing from the first day of term one to Christmas Day. The Choirboy loved it.
In 1997, the last year that The Choirboy and The Kid spent in the choir, the bluestone gothic pile known as The Cathedral Church and Minor Basilica of St Patrick, or simply, St Patrick’s Cathedral, was celebrating a centenary since its consecration.
Huge celebrations were planned and, in its honour, the boys were to perform Handel’s Messiah. The sounds of “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hal-le-lu-jah!” echoed around the sacristies and the nave. His Grace, Archbishop George Pell, was to say the mass.
Other boys, now men, who were in the choir at the time remember Archbishop Pell being a regular presence in their lives.
During May 2016, I called as many of the 50 choristers from the time as I could muster. I think I got to about 35. Of those left, the remainder were either adult or much older members, a couple of overseas visitors, a handful who could just not be found and one or two who chose not to answer my calls or messages. Several are now high-profile singers and musicians.
The boys would practise four days a week, and two of those sessions would be at St Patrick’s Cathedral. Pell would drop in to watch the singing from time to time. Some of the guys also remember him joining the annual camp they attended at Easter to prepare for the holy season’s masses. He would say mass for the boys at the camp.
The Choirboy’s older sister remembers a very amiable boy.
The boys would start their rehearsals an hour before school two days a week and also on Sundays before mass. They’d also have evening sessions at the cathedral once a week. The lead-up to Holy Week at Easter was terribly busy.
Mary’s son began to grumble about getting up to go. Mary just put it down to his teenage years. Then, one day, he snapped.
“Yeah, just out of the blue, ‘I don’t want to be in the choir any more,’” she remembers. “And we said, ‘Well, you do realise we can’t afford the school fees?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘Well, think about it,’ I said, ‘We can’t do anything till the end of the year and you can’t really swap and change.’”
Mary was not pleased. She says for her family, the St Kevin’s school fees were “astronomical”, and it seemed a shame to miss out on the rest of the school experience just because her son was weary of choir. But the boy was immovable. The boy’s father, John (again not his real name), also remembers a meeting with the choirmaster where the parents were told that their son was disruptive in choir practice – coughing during the singing. The choirmaster was also upset that the boy was bending the corners of the music sheets. He also wanted the boy to leave.
The Choirboy’s father, who separated from his wife many years ago, said before his son was about 14, he had always been very well-behaved “and all of a sudden to change from being well-behaved to that was a bit of a mystery”.
The boy became disengaged and disruptive at school. His parents and school were so concerned that in September 1997 they brought him to see a psychiatrist at the Royal Children’s hospital in Melbourne. The assessment, which John has kept, found the boy was of average intelligence and had been a good student. But his grades, had been slipping and, while a friendly enough boy, his answers now tended to the monosyllabic, his responses were “under-elaborated” and his working memory was affected.
At the end of the year, The Choirboy was to be a chorister no more – he was moved out of St Kevin’s to a more affordable local Catholic secondary.
“I just put it down to him being a teenager and deciding he’d had enough – that it was, you know, too tiring,” Mary says.
The Choirboy died in 2014. He was 30.
Mary told almost everyone she knew that he died in a car crash. But it wasn’t a car accident. It was a heroin overdose. She says she just didn’t want the shame and the pity. All that’s left of him now is a poorly tended Facebook page with a poorly taken profile picture. He’s not smiling.
Mary’s daughter kept her mum’s secret too. “I have never told anybody, only one of my closest friends ever knew,” she says. “I told everybody it was because of a car accident because I don’t want to have to explain to people that, you know, my brother lived half his life as a drug addict, and a heavy one at that.”
The funeral was on a Thursday in 2014. The sort of day when, all those years before, Mary would be packing her son off to St Pat’s to sing his little heart out in the cathedral.
Now she was preparing him to be buried.
I was floored. I’ve buried a son, I’ve lost a son due to a drug overdose … And then I get this into my life
Mary, The Choirboy’s mother

Although she had informed The Kid, she was still slightly surprised to see the young man respectfully take his place in a pew. In the following months, Mary would occasionally see The Kid when he came into the shop where she worked. They’d have a small chat. He was a well-brought-up boy, she thought. He’d always give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
Months later, Mary was serving customers at work when she received a telephone call from a detective from Victoria police. Immediately she assumed they were trying to pin something on her son.
“I said, ‘You do realise [my son] passed away?’” And they said they did and they passed on their condolences. And the detective mentioned something about sexual assault.
“Well, I nearly fell over,” she says. “And I said, ‘You can hang a lot of things on my son, but that’s not one thing you can hang on my son’.”
Of course, the detective wasn’t referring to her son as a perpetrator. He wanted to know if her son had told her about anything that he’d borne witness to or experienced during his time at St Patrick’s or St Kevin’s.
Mary was shocked. “And I’ve gone, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about that one, you know, I have no knowledge,’” she remembers.
Detectives from Taskforce SANO, established to investigate child sexual abuse in religious organisations, then came to take a statement from Mary. She was completely in the dark about what had happened. And in her confusion, a new trauma came flooding back.
“I was floored,” Mary says. “I’ve buried a son, I’ve lost a son due to a drug overdose –which is not a nice way to lose a child. And then I get this into my life.”
Scenes from the last 15 years of her son’s life began to flicker through her mind in fast motion. She was racked with questions and struggled to sleep.
After the police went to see Mary, they also visited her ex-husband.
“Nothing shocks me; I’ve seen a lot of stuff,” John explains. “But that did shock me. But then, when I mulled it over, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘That’s making sense.’”
The visit, which police only expected to take an hour, took five. John gave the police the medical reports and other documentation about his son and signed a statement.
One evening, some time after the detectives took Mary’s statement, The Kid happened to come by when Mary was on the late shift. The shop was empty. She decided to have the conversation with him that she suspected would upset her, but she needed to know.
“I just asked him if I could ask him what happened. If, you know, if it wasn’t going to upset him. Because I didn’t want to upset this person, um, because [my son’s] passed away. I didn’t want to bring back bad memories for him.”
But The Kid understood immediately. “He said,
‘No, no, ask me.’ I asked him if my son was a victim and he said, ‘Yes.’”
Her son was a victim, he was saying, of George Pell.
Mary was overcome with a hot rush of anger. Not at The Kid, but at her son, for not telling her. Because Mary had asked her son. Not just once. Something inside of her, some mother’s intuition perhaps, born in the shock after her boy went so quickly and spectacularly off the rails, had made her suspect that he had been a victim of abuse.
“I asked [him], I can’t remember the words I used, whether he was touched up, or played with, and [he] told me ‘no’.”
I would like to think that if [he] would have told me, I would have believed my son. I would have believed my son
Mary
The boy shrugged. She says shrugging was something her son would sometimes do when he didn’t want to talk about things. She still had a niggling feeling something was up.
“I never said anything to anybody,” she says. “And then, again, after a while, I asked him and again he told me ‘no’. And then I get this. And I was just so angry with [him],” she says, closing her eyes at the memory of it, “for not telling me. So angry. Sometimes I’m still very angry.”
The Kid gently told her what he says happened with the archbishop. “He told me that himself and [my son] used to play in the back of the church in the closed-off rooms,” she says.
In the cathedral? I ask her.
“In the cathedral, yep. And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.”
The Kid still remembered the incident so clearly. Being picked up afterwards by his parents. Staring out the car window on the way home. Mary swallows and looks at me in disgust. Her daughter, who has tears in her eyes, keeps her gaze on her mother.
“What went through your mind, as a mother, when you heard that?” I ask quietly.
“Oh, angry,” she says, sighing and stiffening her back. “Angry, as I said, at [my son], for not telling me, but also angry at the Catholic church. I sent my child there – I sent both of my children there – for an education, to be safe. You send your kids to school to be safe. Not to have this done.”
“It’s devastating,” her daughter says, “because it helps to explain a lot of incidents in his life. And yeah, it’s devastating, it is, it’s devastating …
The daughter says she believes that her brother never spoke up about it because he was a very private person.
“And he didn’t like to share a lot of information and I think, as a young boy, you are embarrassed. You don’t want to tell people that another man, let alone a priest, has touched you in any way. You might not think that people believe you. People might judge you, people might say things about you. There could be so many reasons as to why he didn’t want to tell us.”
Mary shares this suspicion, but it breaks her heart. “I would like to think that if [he] would have told me, I would have believed my son. I would have believed my son.”
The Kid told Mary that her son’s funeral was the breaking point for him. It plunged him into despair and regret. His own mother was very concerned about his wellbeing. He had not been coping since his friend’s death.
He decided that he had to come forward, he had to say something. As The Kid told me at the Returned and Services League club the night I met him, his jaw set, his eyes aflame, insisting that this was “about me and it’s about him”. The Kid, with the support of his mum and a victim’s advocate, went to Taskforce SANO.
“He just couldn’t live with it any more – he had to say something,” Mary says.
She says she liked that he did it for her son. But now she and her daughter are left with so many questions, so much fury. She believes The Kid.
The Kid has not led a chequered life. He’s university-educated, he hasn’t had trouble with the law. He has a lovely young girlfriend, lots of friends, he’s a pillar of his community in a sort of understated, slightly ironic way and, in that part of his life, he is, he told me, very happy. He’s managed, just, to keep it together. He’s been able to compartmentalise. He’s the sort of complainant you’d want as a Victoria police detective alleging historic crime.
The strain of all of this, the enormity of it, means The Kid hangs on by a thread at times – and the thread that held him together enough to make a statement was that Taskforce SANO would arrest George Pell.
The Kid was never interested in going on television – he knows that as a sexual assault complainant, the law allows that he never needs to have his identity revealed. He complained because he just wanted justice.
Mary’s daughter believes The Kid had zero to gain from coming forward if he was not telling the truth.
My two older ones remember their uncle and every night they tell me they look out that window and they see his star
The Choirboy’s sister

“You would not put your family through that, you would not put a dead person’s name through that, you would not put yourself through that,” she says. “Because the emotional toll that would take on you for the rest of your life, knowing that people now know your circumstances, what’s happened to you in your personal life – you wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t true.
“I believe 100% in my heart what this young fella has come out and said, the allegations that he has made, I 100% support and believe that they are true, because the effects of coming out, they are devastating.”
Mary thinks it all falls into place – why her son so suddenly lost all interest in the singing he had loved. Why a cherubic choirboy turned into a taciturn drug user at the age of just 14. Why he never managed to kick the habit.
“These people,” she says, referring to abusive clergy, “destroy lives.”
Her daughter nods in agreement. “These people are supposedly someone you look up to. It’s not right, not right at all,” the daughter says.
Mary’s daughter says she is overwhelmed by the courage The Kid showed in complaining about such a powerful member of the church and society.
“It’s not going to bring my brother back,” she says, emotionally, “but it will help the many people that are out there suffering. Because it’s so brave – it’s a really brave thing to do.”
“And I like to think in my heart,” Mary says, “this is what [my son] would say too: ‘This was a friend of mine.’”
“Absolutely,” her daughter adds, “he would absolutely want to help.”
The Choirboy’s sister becomes tearful as she speaks of the impact that her brother’s life and his loss has had on her three young children.
“My youngest will never meet his uncle. The two older ones remember their uncle and every night they tell me that they look out that window and they see his star.”
Her mother swallows, her eyes filling, as the daughter continues.
“They should be able to hold him, and to hug him.”

“I shouldn’t have lost my son like that,” Mary says, “and nobody else should either. And it’s wrong.” Her lip quivers. “This is something I live with now. This is something that kills me a little bit every day. And it kills me.”
Epilogue

That very same year, his friend, The Kid, had also made the same firm decision to get out of the choir as soon as he possibly could. His behaviour at school also became a problem. His voice had broken and, no longer a soprano, his choir days were numbered. He too had gone to another Catholic school, and the families rarely saw each other. The boys drifted apart.
Mary’s daughter noticed a marked difference in her little brother from that point.
“Looking back, yeah, his whole personality, well, he changed. He did. He wasn’t the same person as what he was beforehand,” she says.
“His life spiralled,” Mary says. “It really did spiral.” Her daughter nods and presses her lips together.
Mary and her daughter are sitting on a sofa in Mary’s living room in her unit in a suburb of Melbourne. They are hospitable and decent women, unpretentious and plainly dressed. They have been searching for answers for what happened to their son and brother for years.
Mary lives alone – her daughter is bringing up a young family. Mary works in a shop and tries to make sense of life. But her sparse little unit is a house of grief. While she is stoic and does not make a fuss about the raw deal that the past few years have dealt her, her mouth betrays her. It’s permanently slightly drawn down at the corners. She’s a woman who has had a full-time job keeping a son together and now he’s gone. After it happened, she was left scratching her head, making meals for one and wondering how it all went so wrong. Until The Kid came along.
The year after he left the choir, The Choirboy got into drugs. In a big way. While at age 13 he had sung Handel’s Messiah, clad in a choirboy’s crimson and white robes, eyes cast up to heaven, by his 14th year he was already dabbling in heroin.
“It’s devastating to watch your child spiral like that,” Mary says, shaking her head at the memory of anger, frustration, heartbreak that she dealt with in equal parts.
John had worked as an honorary probation officer for many years and he saw the same behaviour in his son as in the juvenile justice kids he worked with, who were often victims of abuse. “I met a lot of young offenders of that age – and they are different. They behave differently, their mannerisms are different. That’s the way [my son] was going and yet there was no reason for why he should be that way.”
His sister watched her brother completely withdraw.
of view, he changed to a point where you know, he was in his own world,” she says.
The teenager changed friendship groups. He stopped talking.
“He just became very distant, very enclosed,” she says. “It was embarrassing for me because, looking back, I didn’t know why or what this stemmed from and how this was … ” She trails off. “It was embarrassing for me as a sister that I had a brother that was like this.”
For Mary, it was harrowing to watch her son constantly chasing heroin. Every now and then, he’d go to rehab and she’d have to drive him somewhere to help him score because you wouldn’t get in to a program if too much time had lapsed since your last hit. It was mind-boggling for a decent woman who thought she’d brought up two great kids, given them the best education she could.
From time to time, her son would report that he had bumped into The Kid somewhere when he was out socialising with his mates. He told his mum that The Kid was “struggling a bit”.
She asked her son was it drugs, too? But no, it wasn’t drugs, he answered. He was just “struggling”. Her son was a young man of few words and, at the time, The Kid’s struggles had no meaning for her, and so she didn’t inquire any further.
Her son’s heroin chase went on for about 15 years. The Choirboy never had a career, was never able to hold down much of a job. He was a devoted uncle to his small niece and nephew and Mary says he was, despite it all, a loving and good son. He lived with his mum and she was sometimes questioned about why she didn’t kick him out. But Mary knew she was all her son had.
“I care about my son, I love my son, that’s my son,” she says, speaking in the present tense of a mother who still struggles to come to terms with the fact that her youngest child is now a past-tense concept. “If I don’t care about him, no one else is going to care about him – simple as that.”
The Choirboy died in 2014. He was 30.
Mary told almost everyone she knew that he died in a car crash. But it wasn’t a car accident. It was a heroin overdose. She says she just didn’t want the shame and the pity. All that’s left of him now is a poorly tended Facebook page with a poorly taken profile picture. He’s not smiling.
Mary’s daughter kept her mum’s secret too. “I have never told anybody, only one of my closest friends ever knew,” she says. “I told everybody it was because of a car accident because I don’t want to have to explain to people that, you know, my brother lived half his life as a drug addict, and a heavy one at that.”
The funeral was on a Thursday in 2014. The sort of day when, all those years before, Mary would be packing her son off to St Pat’s to sing his little heart out in the cathedral.
Now she was preparing him to be buried.
I was floored. I’ve buried a son, I’ve lost a son due to a drug overdose … And then I get this into my life
Although she had informed The Kid, she was still slightly surprised to see the young man respectfully take his place in a pew. In the following months, Mary would occasionally see The Kid when he came into the shop where she worked. They’d have a small chat. He was a well-brought-up boy, she thought. He’d always give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
Months later, Mary was serving customers at work when she received a telephone call from a detective from Victoria police. Immediately she assumed they were trying to pin something on her son.
“I said, ‘You do realise [my son] passed away?’” And they said they did and they passed on their condolences. And the detective mentioned something about sexual assault.
“Well, I nearly fell over,” she says. “And I said, ‘You can hang a lot of things on my son, but that’s not one thing you can hang on my son’.”
Of course, the detective wasn’t referring to her son as a perpetrator. He wanted to know if her son had told her about anything that he’d borne witness to or experienced during his time at St Patrick’s or St Kevin’s.
Mary was shocked. “And I’ve gone, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about that one, you know, I have no knowledge,’” she remembers.
Detectives from Taskforce SANO, established to investigate child sexual abuse in religious organisations, then came to take a statement from Mary. She was completely in the dark about what had happened. And in her confusion, a new trauma came flooding back.
,” Mary says. “I’ve buried a son, I’ve lost a son due to a drug overdose –which is not a nice way to lose a child. And then I get this into my life.”
Scenes from the last 15 years of her son’s life began to flicker through her mind in fast motion. She was racked with questions and struggled to sleep.
After the police went to see Mary, they also visited her ex-husband.
“Nothing shocks me; I’ve seen a lot of stuff,” John explains. “But that did shock me. But then, when I mulled it over, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘That’s making sense.’”
The visit, which police only expected to take an hour, took five. John gave the police the medical reports and other documentation about his son and signed a statement.
One evening, some time after the detectives took Mary’s statement, The Kid happened to come by when Mary was on the late shift. The shop was empty. She decided to have the conversation with him that she suspected would upset her, but she needed to know.
“I just asked him if I could ask him what happened. If, you know, if it wasn’t going to upset him. Because I didn’t want to upset this person, um, because [my son’s] passed away. I didn’t want to bring back bad memories for him.”
But The Kid understood immediately. “He said, ‘No, no, ask me.’ I asked him if my son was a victim and he said, ‘Yes.’”
Her son was a victim, he was saying, of George Pell.
Mary was overcome with a hot rush of anger. Not at The Kid, but at her son, for not telling her. Because Mary had asked her son. Not just once. Something inside of her, some mother’s intuition perhaps, born in the shock after her boy went so quickly and spectacularly off the rails, had made her suspect that he had been a victim of abuse.
“I asked [him], I can’t remember the words I used, whether he was touched up, or played with, and [he] told me ‘no’.”
I would like to think that if [he] would have told me, I would have believed my son. I would have believed my son
Mary
The boy shrugged. She says shrugging was something her son would sometimes do when he didn’t want to talk about things. She still had a niggling feeling something was up.
“I never said anything to anybody,” she says. “And then, again, after a while, I asked him and again he told me ‘no’. And then I get this. And I was just so angry with [him],” she says, closing her eyes at the memory of it, “for not telling me. So angry. Sometimes I’m still very angry.”
The Kid gently told her what he says happened with the archbishop. “He told me that himself and [my son] used to play in the back of the church in the closed-off rooms,” she says.
In the cathedral? I ask her.
“In the cathedral, yep. And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.”
The Kid still remembered the incident so clearly. Being picked up afterwards by his parents. Staring out the car window on the way home. Mary swallows and looks at me in disgust. Her daughter, who has tears in her eyes, keeps her gaze on her mother.
“What went through your mind, as a mother, when you heard that?” I ask quietly.
“Oh, angry,” she says, sighing and stiffening her back. “Angry, as I said, at [my son], for not telling me, but also angry at the Catholic church. I sent my child there – I sent both of my children there – for an education, to be safe. You send your kids to school to be safe. Not to have this done.”
“It’s devastating,” her daughter says, “because it helps to explain a lot of incidents in his life. And yeah, it’s devastating, it is, it’s devastating … ”
The daughter says she believes that her brother never spoke up about it because he was a very private person.
“And he didn’t like to share a lot of information and I think, as a young boy, you are embarrassed. You don’t want to tell people that another man, let alone a priest, has touched you in any way. You might not think that people believe you. People might judge you, people might say things about you. There could be so many reasons as to why he didn’t want to tell us.”
Mary shares this suspicion, but it breaks her heart. “I would like to think that if [he] would have told me, I would have believed my son. I would have believed my son.”
The Kid told Mary that her son’s funeral was the breaking point for him. It plunged him into despair and regret. His own mother was very concerned about his wellbeing. He had not been coping since his friend’s death.
He decided that he had to come forward, he had to say something. As The Kid told me at the Returned and Services League club the night I met him, his jaw set, his eyes aflame, insisting that this was “about me and it’s about him”. The Kid, with the support of his mum and a victim’s advocate, went to Taskforce SANO.
“He just couldn’t live with it any more – he had to say something,” Mary says.
She says she liked that he did it for her son. But now she and her daughter are left with so many questions, so much fury. She believes The Kid.
The Kid has not led a chequered life. He’s university-educated, he hasn’t had trouble with the law. He has a lovely young girlfriend, lots of friends, he’s a pillar of his community in a sort of understated, slightly ironic way and, in that part of his life, he is, he told me, very happy. He’s managed, just, to keep it together. He’s been able to compartmentalise. He’s the sort of complainant you’d want as a Victoria police detective alleging historic crime.
The strain of all of this, the enormity of it, means The Kid hangs on by a thread at times – and the thread that held him together enough to make a statement was that Taskforce SANO would arrest George Pell.
The Kid was never interested in going on television – he knows that as a sexual assault complainant, the law allows that he never needs to have his identity revealed. He complained because he just wanted justice.
Mary’s daughter believes The Kid had zero to gain from coming forward if he was not telling the truth.
My two older ones remember their uncle and every night they tell me they look out that window and they see his star
The Choirboy’s sister

“You would not put your family through that, you would not put a dead person’s name through that, you would not put yourself through that,” she says. “Because the emotional toll that would take on you for the rest of your life, knowing that people now know your circumstances, what’s happened to you in your personal life – you wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t true.
“I believe 100% in my heart what this young fella has come out and said, the allegations that he has made, I 100% support and believe that they are true, because the effects of coming out, they are devastating.”
Mary thinks it all falls into place – why her son so suddenly lost all interest in the singing he had loved. Why a cherubic choirboy turned into a taciturn drug user at the age of just 14. Why he never managed to kick the habit.
“These people,” she says, referring to abusive clergy, “destroy lives.”
Her daughter nods in agreement. “These people are supposedly someone you look up to. It’s not right, not right at all,” the daughter says.
Mary’s daughter says she is overwhelmed by the courage The Kid showed in complaining about such a powerful member of the church and society.
“It’s not going to bring my brother back,” she says, emotionally, “but it will help the many people that are out there suffering. Because it’s so brave – it’s a really brave thing to do.”
“And I like to think in my heart,” Mary says, “this is what [my son] would say too: ‘This was a friend of mine.’”
“Absolutely,” her daughter adds, “he would absolutely want to help.”
The Choirboy’s sister becomes tearful as she speaks of the impact that her brother’s life and his loss has had on her three young children.
“My youngest will never meet his uncle. The two older ones remember their uncle and every night they tell me that they look out that window and they see his star.”
Her mother swallows, her eyes filling, as the daughter continues.
“They should be able to hold him, and to hug him.”

“I shouldn’t have lost my son like that,” Mary says, “and nobody else should either. And it’s wrong.” Her lip quivers. “This is something I live with now. This is something that kills me a little bit every day. And it kills me.”
Epilogue
On the day this book was published, the Victorian office of public prosecutions sent the Pell brief back to Victoria police and said Taskforce SANO was free to charge Cardinal George Pell if it wished. Six weeks later, on 29 June 2017, Pell was charged with historical child sexual offences. On December 11 he was convicted on all five counts.
• This is an edited extract from Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell by Louise Milligan (Melbourne University Publishing, available as an ebook and in bookshops now)

PELL BEING INTERVIEWED BY AUSTRALIAN POLICE IN ROME.

tHE ,ORE

The more priests, bishops and cardinals that are accused and prosecuted for child sexual abuse the more danger there is that the clerical collar becomes a symbol of paedophilia.

I wear my clerical collar every day for two reasons:

As a sign of Christianity and Jesus Christ.

As an invite to anyone who wants to approach me to do so.

However I am aware that more and more priests are not wearing the collar in public out of a fear of being called a paedophile or even being attacked.

I have only been abused on the street twice – and called a paedophile – and both instances happened in Dublin.

I have never been verbally abused for being a priest in Belfast or any where in Northern Ireland.

Maybe that is because religion matters more in Northern Ireland than it does in the Republic?

Ireland is fast becoming anti religion and anti clerical.

And who can blame the people – given the fact that we clerics are most often in the news these days for abuse and abuse cover up.

There is an old story of the time that Napoleon Bonaparte met a cardinal. He tld that cardinal that he was going to destroy the church. The cardinal answered: “You have no chance. We priests have been trying to do that for hundreds of years.

Currently the Roman Church is being destroyed. And it is not being destroyed by secularism, materialism or pluralism.

It is being destroyed by priests and bishops and by rampant clericalism.

George Pell is the latest, big, nail in the coffin!

HOLY COMMUNIONS, CONFIRMATIONS AND A WEDDING IN PORTLAOISE

I am in Portlaoise yesterday and today.

Yesterday I had a ceremony in which some local children received their First Holy Communion and the Sacrament of Confirmation.

Today I am celebrating a Catholic marriage ceremony for a young couple and meeting other couples who wish to marry in the future.

Portlaoise is home territory for me. I am a Midlands man and was born in nearby Tullamore.

BREAKING NEWS – PELL TAKEN INTO CUSTODY

Cardinal Pell: Poisoned power at the top of the Church
By Martin Bashir Religion editor BBC 26 February 2019

Last weekend’s unprecedented Vatican summit on child sexual abuse was closed with a Sunday homily by Australian Mark Coleridge, the Archbishop of Brisbane.
“In sexual abuse,” Archbishop Coleridge said, “the powerful lay hands on the Lord’s… weakest and most vulnerable.”
He could have been describing his fellow countryman, Cardinal George Pell, for there are few as powerful to have fallen from grace within the Roman Catholic Church.
Pell is certainly the most senior churchman to have been convicted of offences against children.
‘Cardinal Rambo’
Pell was appointed by the Pope as Prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy, which effectively runs the Vatican’s voluminous finances.
Following his appointment, he relocated to Rome from Australia, where he had been the Archbishop of Sydney since 2001.
Pell, who began a five-year term in 2014 with offices on the first floor of the Apostolic Palace, quickly set about introducing new accounting standards, established the Holy See’s financial watchdog to deal with suspicious transactions, and ensured that the Vatican Bank’s accounts were independently audited.
A bullish figure who faced plenty of obstruction, he was known among some officials as “Cardinal Rambo”. But that was more a term of endearment – because Pell was having a positive impact on the church’s finances.
News of his conviction for child sexual abuse is a grave blow not just to the church, but also to Pope Francis personally.
He was one of the Pope’s closest aides.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES Image caption Pell was appointed to oversee the Vatican’s finances in 2014
He was not only leading the crucial reform of the church’s sprawling finances, but was also appointed by Francis to his nine-member Council of Cardinal Advisors, known as the C9. It was the C9 that encouraged Pope Francis to host this first-ever summit on child sexual abuse.
But that was just one of many Vatican departments in which Pell played a significant role.
Poison from top to bottom
Cardinal Pell was a member of the Congregation of Bishops, the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Congregation for the Institutes of the Consecrated Life and the Societies of Apostolic Life, and the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation.
His conviction confirms that the poison of sexual abuse has infected every level of the Roman Catholic Church

Back in 2012, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard established a Royal Commission to inquire into institutional responses to child abuse in Australia.

It found that 7% of priests in Australia had abused children.
The charges against Pell emerged from Australia’s rigorous inquiry into every institution that had access to children.
The state began a process that the church itself seemed incapable of managing – and now this 77-year-old ambitious Cardinal will swap the Apostolic Palace for a jail cell.
And in a final turn of providence, or coincidence, it won’t even be necessary for Pope Francis to fire Cardinal Pell from office.
His five-year term as Prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy expired on 24 February.

PAT SAYS

Cardinal Pell has been convicted of sexually abusing minors.

He will be sentenced this week.

He is the highest ranking cleric in the RC to be convicted of such crimes.

He still has an appeal in the system. That appeal will cement or overturn his conviction.

I imagine an overturn is highly unlikely – but not impossible.

I watched an original tv programme that interviewed the victims. I was impressed with what they had to say and how they conducted themselves. I believed they were telling the truth.

Sadly one of them died recently and never got to know the outcome.

Pope Francis is now left with another McCarrick decision – to dismiss Pell from the College of Cardinals and to remove him from the clerical state.

He will probably wait for the outcome of the appeal to do that?

We had Cardinal Keith O’Brien in Scotland; Cardinal Groer in Austria; McCarrick in the USA and now Pell in Australia. There are others out there who have not yet been exposed.

It shows how widespread and universal the problem is.

The Roman Catholic Church is in melt down.

“How the mighty have fallen”.

Charles Collins Crux

ROME – Throughout the Vatican abuse summit, the role of the media in exposing the misdeeds and cover-ups the Church has often discussed.
On Saturday, during the final presentation of the Feb. 21-24 event, a journalist told the gathering that bishops must “choose sides”: The side of the abuser or the side of the victim.
Valentina Alazraki has been the Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa since 1974, covering five pontificates.
The reporter is one of three women, and the only non-bishops, to address the four-day gathering.
She said the press does not need to see the Church as an enemy.
“If you are against those who commit or cover up abuse, then we are on the same side. We can be allies, not enemies. We will help you to find the rotten apples and to overcome resistance in order to separate them from the healthy ones,” Alazraki said.
“But if you do not decide in a radical way to be on the side of the children, mothers, families, civil society, you are right to be afraid of us, because we journalists, who seek the common good, will be your worst enemies.”
Alazraki told the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences that she wasn’t only speaking to them as a journalist, but as a mother.
“I doubt that anyone in this hall does not think the Church is, first of all, mother. Many of us present here have or have had a brother or sister. Let us also remember that our mothers, while loving us all in the same way, were especially devoted to the frailest, weakest children, to those who perhaps did not know how to move ahead in life on their own feet and needed a little push,” she said.
“For a mother there are no first or second-class children; there are stronger children and more vulnerable ones. Nor are there first and second-class children for the Church.”
Alazraki said that as a journalist, woman and mother, she thinks covering up abuse is as contemptible as the abuse itself, and that she knows better than most that abuses have been covered up “from the ground up.”
“I think you should be aware that the more you cover up, the more you play the ostrich, fail to inform the mass media and thus, the faithful and public opinion, the greater the scandal will be. If someone has a tumor, it is not cured by hiding it from one’s family or friends; silence will not make it heal; in the end it will be the most highly recommended treatments that will prevent metastasis and lead to healing,” she said.

The Mexican journalist emphasized the importance of transparency, and said that not providing information can lead to further abuse, and that this will encourage a climate of suspicion and anger against the Church.
She mentioned the example of the disgraced founder of the Mexican religious order, the Legionnaires of Christ. Marcial Maciel dodged accusations of abuse and financial improprieties for decades before being removed from active ministry by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.
“Marcial Maciel would not have been able, for decades, to abuse seminarians and to have three or four lives, wives and children, who came to accuse him of having abused his own children,” she said.
She gave the bishops three practical tips: Put the victims first, be willing to seek advice, and to professionalize their communications services.
“The figure of the spokesperson is fundamental. Not only must it be a highly-trained individual, but he or she must also be able to rely on the full trust of the bishop and have direct access to him 24 hours a day. This is not a 9 to 5 job,” Alazraki said.
She reminded the bishops that it is not the reporters who abused and covered up.
“Our mission is to assert and defend a right, which is a right to information based on truth in order to obtain justice. We journalists know that abuse is not limited to the Catholic Church, but you must understand that we have to be more rigorous with you than with others, by virtue of your moral role,” she said.
After Alazraki’s speech, the participants of the Vatican abuse summit were scheduled to attend a penitential liturgy in Sala Regia in the Apostolic Palace, and the event will end on Sunday at a Mass celebrated in the same place.

PAT SAYS

This is a wonderful contribution by this intelligent woman who gave it, unvarnished, to the boyos in Rome.

Well done Valentina.

This contribution also shows clearly that we need powerful and bright women involved at every level of the church.

It seems to me that the Holy Spirit abandoned The Vatican a long time ago.

That Holy Spirit is now working through victims and the media to challenge the new Pharisees in the hierarchy and media.

Victims and the media are the modern prophets calling out the hypocrisy of the elite and the powerful.

Put Valentina in charge of a new dicastery to oversee bishops snd clerics in the area of abuse and cover up.

Watch how a good bright woman cleans out the Herculean stables.

Feb 24, 2019

by Joshua J. McElwee

Pope Francis celebrates a Mass on the last day of the four-day meeting on the protection of minors in the church at the Vatican Feb. 24, in this image taken from Vatican television. (CNS photo/Vatican Television via Reuters)

Editor’s Note: This story was updated with details from the press conference at 8:45 a.m. Central time.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis ended his summit with 190 Catholic bishops on clergy sexual abuse Feb. 24 with a promise the church will “decisively confront” the abuse of minors, but also warned that the global institution must avoid “ideological disputes and journalistic practices” that he said exploit the scandals.
In a lengthy address ending the first-of-its-kind meeting with the heads of the world’s Catholic bishops’ conferences, the pontiff mixed condemnations of abuse in the church with references to its prevalence in other areas of society and cautionings against the faith community being too extreme in its response.

At one point in the half-hour speech, the pope called clerics who abuse children “tools of Satan” and declared bluntly that such criminal behavior is “utterly incompatible with [the church’s] moral authority and ethical credibility.”
At another point, Francis said that in responding to abuse the church must avoid what he called the “extreme” of “‘justicialism,’ provoked by guilt for past errors and media pressure.”
“The church’s aim will … be to hear, watch over, protect and care for abused, exploited and forgotten children, wherever they are,” the pope promised.
Francis then continued: “To achieve that goal, the church must rise above the ideological disputes and journalistic practices that often exploit, for various interests, the very tragedy experienced by the little ones.”
During the four-day summit, the pope and prelates focused their discussions on three main themes: responsibility, accountability and transparency. They also heard testimonies from abuse survivors and even experienced one survivor play violin for them at an evening penitential liturgy Feb. 23.
Abuse survivors and advocates quickly criticized Francis’ closing address as being short on specifics for how the church would combat sexual abuse.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the abuse tracking website BishopAccountability.org, called the speech a “stunning letdown.” She added: “We needed him to offer a bold and decisive plan. He gave us instead defensive, recycled rhetoric.”
At a briefing later in the day Feb. 24, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi announced four measures that will be put in place following the conclusion of the summit.
Lombardi, who moderated the summit, said one of those measures would be the combination of a new ‘motu proprio’ and a new law to “strengthen prevention and the fight against abuse” within Vatican city-state.
The Jesuit said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will also be publishing a new Vademecum, or handbook, to “help bishops around the world clearly understand their duties and tasks” with regard to abuse.
Francis spoke Feb. 24 following the summit’s closing Mass in the apostolic palace. The homily at the Mass was given by Australian Archbishop Mark Coleridge, who reflected on how Catholic prelates had misused the power entrusted to them.
“We have shown too little mercy, and therefore we will receive the same, because the measure we give will be the measure we receive in return,” said Coleridge, the president of the Australian bishops’ conference. “We will not go unpunished.”

Read this Next: Exclusive: Archbishop suggests creating new Vatican office to tackle abuse, clerical culture

Before directly addressing abuse of children by church officials in his later address, Francis spent the first several minutes of his speech discussing the wider sociological impact of abuse. Citing a 2017 UNICEF study on abuse in 28 countries, he noted that 9 out of 10 girls victimized were abused by “someone they knew or who was close to their family.”
The pope then spoke of cases of cyber-abuse and what he called the “scourge of pornography,” which he said was “a phenomenon in constant growth,” and sexual tourism, citing 2017 statistics from the World Tourism Organization that three million people travel each year seeking sexual relations with a minor.
“We are thus facing a universal problem, tragically present almost everywhere and affecting everyone,” said Francis. “Yet we need to be clear, that while gravely affecting our societies as a whole, this evil is in no way less monstrous when it takes place within the church.”
Arriving at abuse in the church, the pontiff said that “no explanations suffice” for priests who have harmed children.
“We need to recognize with humility and courage that we stand face to face with the mystery of evil, which strikes most violently against the most vulnerable,” said the pope.
“The church has now become increasingly aware of the need not only to curb the gravest cases of abuse by disciplinary measures and civil and canonical processes, but also to decisively confront the phenomenon both inside and outside the church,” he continued.
The pope said that in peoples’ anger over abuse, “the church sees the reflection of the wrath of God, betrayed and insulted by these deceitful consecrated persons.”
Francis ended his address with a reference to the World Health Organization’s INSPIRE initiative, which proposes seven strategies for ending violence against children and then put forward eight points he said the church would concentrate on in “developing her legislation” on abuse.
The first of those points was a promise that children would be protected and that a “change of mentality” would take place “to combat a defensive and reactive approach to protecting the institution and to pursue, wholeheartedly and decisively, the good of the community by giving priority to the victims of abuse in every sense.”
The second and third points were a commitment to “impeccable seriousness” in abuse cases and to a “genuine purification” in the church.
The fourth and fifth points regarded the formation of priests and the “strengthening and reviewing” of the bishops’ conferences’ various safeguarding guidelines.
“No abuse should ever be covered up, as was often the case in the past, or not taken sufficiently seriously, since the covering up of abuses favors the spread of evil and adds a further level of scandal,” said Francis.
The sixth point concerned accompaniment for those who have suffered abuse, the seventh abuse in the digital world and the eighth sexual tourism.

In the seventh point, Francis proposed that the church’s norms on child pornography should be changed in order to raise the threshold of what is considered an image of a child to above the current age of 14.
At the briefing later Feb. 24, two of the organizers of the summit hinted at a further change Francis may be considering: getting rid of the use of pontifical secret, or confidentiality, in abuse cases.
Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias said that was a reform the church “certainly must look into.” Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna said: “There’s no need for this top-heavy law, especially concerning sex abuse cases.”
Scicluna, who is also an adjunct secretary at the doctrinal congregation, said that with the summit the church has been clear to bishops about how it expects them to handle abuse cases.
“It is now a very clear point in church policy that abuse of minors is an egregious crime, but so is cover-up,” said the archbishop. “There is no going back. For decades we were concentrating on the crime. But we also realize that covering up is equally egregious.”
The final session of the abuse summit Feb. 23 was marked by frank and forthright speeches to the assembled prelates by Nigerian Holy Child Jesus Sr. Veronica Openibo and Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki, who has covered the Vatican for some 40 years.
Openibo, the head of her order and a member of the executive board of the Rome-based umbrella group International Union of Superiors General, criticized priests who supported accused brethren over victims and expressed serious concerns about current formation practices.
The sister eloquently blasted what she called a culture of “mediocrity, hypocrisy, and complacency” that she said had brought the church to a “disgraceful and scandalous place.”
Alazraki, who has traveled on 150 trips abroad with popes since John Paul II, said those in her profession can help the bishops root out the “rotten apples and to overcome resistance in order to separate them from the healthy ones.”
She also made a promise.
“If you do not decide in a radical way to be on the side of the children, mothers, families, civil society, you are right to be afraid of us, because we journalists — who seek the common good — will be your worst enemies,” she told the prelates.
[Joshua J. McElwee is NCR national correspondent. His email address is jmcelwee@ncronline.org. Follow him on Twitter: @joshjmac.]

Robert Mickens, Rome
Vatican City

February 22, 2019

On the eve of the Vatican’s summit aimed at getting the entire Church to face up to the ever-widening clerical sex abuse crisis, some in the media wondered if the meeting risked being overshadowed by other controversies.
One was supposed to be the issue of gay priests — whom traditionalist Catholics have scapegoated as pederasts, and a French author has sensationalized in a just-released book in which he claims the Catholic hierarchy and the Roman Curia are full of gay men who are either leading double lives or are actually homophobic and militantly anti-homosexual.
Another looming controversy that was destined to detract from the abuse summit was the recent revelation that the Vatican has issued secret rules for priests who have fathered children.
And yet another was the issue of religious women (nuns) who have been sexually abused and raped by priests and bishops, something the Vatican has tried to keep quiet for a number of decades.
None of these controversies is directly related to the sexual abuse of minors; with apologies to our traditionalist brothers and sisters who are convinced that gay priests are prone to be child molesters.
However, there is an issue that is related to the abuse summit. And it is one that very few people are talking about. It’s the Vatican’s lack of transparency in dealing with credibly accused predator priests working directly for the Holy See.
Ensuring that all bishops and Church leaders commit themselves unwaveringly to a policy of transparency is one of the main objectives of the summit.
But how can that happen when transparency — and not just concerning sex abuse cases — has rarely been one of the Vatican’s prime virtues?

External pressure leads to removal of Vatican officials accused of abuse

Over the past several months at least three senior officials in the Roman Curia have been removed from their posts after reports revealed they had all been credibly accused of activities related to sexual abuse.
The first was Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta who resigned from his diocese in August 2017 at age 53, more than 20 years prior to the normal retirement age, and was given a job four months later that Pope Francis specially carved out for him at the Vatican’s “central bank,” the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA).
Vatican officials claim they never knew of the abuse allegations against Zanchetta, and they are substantial.
Rather, they say the bishop resigned because of difficulties in managing his diocese. They have offered no other information to shed light on the case.
Zanchetta was suspended from his Vatican duties this past January following media reports last autumn that detailed accusations he sexually harassed seminarians and priests, sending some of them nude photos of himself. He was also accused of possessing pornographic images on his cell phone.
A few weeks later another accused Vatican official stepped down because of abuse allegations. Father Hermann Geissler, a religious order priest from Austria, worked at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for more than 25 years and had been an office manager (capo ufficio) since 2009.
His resignation on Jan. 28 was again the result of media pressure, not by any willingness of the Vatican to be transparent.
On Nov. 30 we were the first publication outside the German-speaking world to report that a former nun had formally denounced Geissler to Vatican officials in 2014 for making sexual advances towards her six years earlier during confession.
Several weeks after our initial report, the National Catholic Reporter published another article on the accusations and the 53-year-old Geissler resigned from his CDF post.
The Vatican again had been anything but transparent.

The Punderson Case

The third senior Roman Curia official who was discovered in these months to have been credibly accused of sexual abuse — and this time with a minor — was Monsignor Joseph Punderson, a judge at the Vatican’s “supreme court.”
Last week’s “Letter from Rome” reported that the 70-year-old priest had been identified on Feb. 13 by his home Diocese of Trenton (New Jersey) as “credibly accused of abusing a minor” and had been “removed from ministry.”
No other international news media (except La Croix in French) picked up the story until several days later when reporters asked the Holy See Press Office for an explanation about Punderson’s status at the Vatican.
The New Jersey priest had been working at the Apostolic Signatura since 1993, serving as Defender of the Bond since 1995.
During a packed press conference on Jan. 18 to reveal the program of the abuse summit, the press office’s ad interim director, Alessandro Gisotti, tried to quash two questions about Punderson, stating that the briefing was limited to topics related to the summit!
He eventually said that the American priest was “not at the tribunal of the Signatura right now.” He said all questions pertaining to Punderson should be referred to the diocese in New Jersey.
Gisotti was obviously instructed to do so by officials at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State or the prefect of the Apostolic Signatura — Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, a former Vatican “foreign minister.”

Rome covers for Trenton, until it doesn’t

The Punderson case is troubling for a number of reasons.
It seems clear that the Vatican would have never revealed that a priest credibly accused of sexually abusing a minor was working in the Church’s highest court had the media not first reported it.
There is no public record from the Holy See that Msgr. Punderson retired (usual age is 75) or was removed from his Vatican job. The recent updates to the Annuario Pontificio, which are published internally every one-to-three months, do not indicate a change of personnel at the Signatura.
So on Feb. 20 reporters again pressed Mr. Gisotti about Punderson’s status. After initially declining to answer, he said the priest “is no longer in service at the tribunal of the Apostolic Signature and has been in retirement since last fall.”
Later that same day, Catholic News Service (CNS) obtained a statement from Rayanne Bennett, director of communications for the Diocese of Trenton, confirming just that.
Ms. Bennett also disclosed that Punderson “was credibly accused in 2003 of the sexual abuse of a minor 26 years earlier.”
She said it was “the first and only claim” against him and that it “was promptly reported to the appropriate prosecutor, who declined to pursue criminal charges.”
“The allegation was also reported to the Holy See, and Msgr. Punderson submitted his resignation in 2004,” the diocesan spokesperson said.
“The Holy See, however, permitted him to continue in office but under specific restrictions regarding public acts of ministry initially imposed by the Diocese of Trenton in 2003,” she said.
She did not specify what those “specific restrictions” entailed.
Punderson “was instructed to resign his Vatican position by the bishop in late fall 2018 and his resignation was accepted. He has been removed from all public ministry,” Bennett said.

Less than transparent answers, lack of details

The Diocese of Trenton has not published the statement that its communications director sent to CNS. It is nowhere to be found on the diocesan website or anywhere else.
Meanwhile, the list of credibly accused priests that was published on Feb. 13 was updated two days later as Bishop David O’Connell promised it would be “as more information becomes available.”
The new information includes how many allegations have been made against each priest and a list of the places where each had served. But it does not give the dates of those assignments.
The lack of such a timeline is another breach of transparency. Such information would state when a priest first affiliated with the diocese as a seminarian, where he studied, when he was ordained and where, each and every step of the way, he was assigned.
It also would state if any of the listed priests were “on leave,” a possible indication of removal for the purpose of counseling in light of other allegations or suspicion of misconduct.
All this documentation has been proven to be essential for helping other possible victims come forward and break their silence.
In the case of Msgr. Punderson such a timeline would indicate that he completed his basic theological studies in Rome in 1974, but was not ordained until two years after his classmates. The reason for delay would not necessarily be published, but it would certainly raise questions.

The laws are made in Rome, but they are applied elsewhere

During the Feb. 18 press conference to unveil the program and details of the Vatican summit on the abuse of minors, Archbishop Charles Scicluna said the questions raised about Punderson’s status were legitimate. But he refused to go into details.
Instead, the 59-year-old Archbishop of Malta said: “People need to know that what Rome asks of the local Churches it is also ready to apply at home.”
Scicluna is widely recognized as one of the most credible Church officials on dealing with sexual abuse. He is perhaps best known for his time at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith where, from 2002-2012, he was essentially the “chief prosecutor” of abuse cases.
But he first began working in the Vatican in 1995. He was hired by the Apostolic Signatura to be deputy Promoter of Justice, the very post Msgr. Punderson had just vacated after becoming that same tribunal’s Defender of the Bond.
Scicluna told an anecdote from that first year in the Roman Curia.
“When I came to the Holy See in 1995, somebody told me, ‘You know, Charles, looking at St. Peter’s (Basilica) you have two statues — one of St. Peter and one of St. Paul. One of the statues has its hand stretched out and the other has the hand pointed to the ground,” he recalled.
“And the wisdom was that the laws are made here but they are applied there,” he said, drawing laughter from the reporters.
Then the archbishop grew more serious and said: “The statues will remain where they are. But the interpretation needs to be: they (the laws) are made here and they are also applied here.”
Until that happens the Vatican’s credibility will continue to erode. And not only regarding its programs and promises to eradicate sexual abuse among the clergy.

 

The editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper, Michael Kelly, has personally apologised to me for the false claim made by the newspaper which said my weddings were not legal in the Republic of Ireland.

He telephoned me yesterday from Rome to say that they got it completely wrong. He apologised and has said he will publish a full apology and correction in the papers next edition.

The offending article had claimed that I was not on the Register of Solemnisers – which is not true.

I celebrated my first Irish wedding as a deacon in 1975 – so my weddings in Ireland have been legal for 44 years.

Mr. Kelly said the young journalist got it wrong and that he is “gutted”.

Im glad the newspaper has apologised and promised a clarification.

Its very important that the couples I’ve married know that their marriages are totally authentic in the eyes of the state.

I never tell a couple I marry them in canon law.

I simply marry them in the eyes of God and the state.

Blessed John Henry Newman is seen in a portrait provided by the Catholic Church in England and Wales. Catholic bishops in England hope for his canonization in 2019 after Vatican theologians conclude that the inexplicable healing of a U.S. woman with life-threatening complications in pregnancy was a miracle attributable to him.

Illinois doctor: Newman miracle depositions were ‘spiritual experiences’

JOYCE DURIGA

Catholic Herald 19. 2. 2019

CHICAGO — When the Vatican announced Feb. 15 that Pope Francis had signed a decree recognizing a miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed John Henry Newman, clearing the way for his canonization, there was rejoicing in Chicago.
The proposed miracle that God worked through the intercession of Newman in 2013 involved a local mother who faced life-threatening complications during her pregnancy but suddenly recovered when she prayed to the English cardinal for help.
The woman, who declined to comment at this time but said she will share her story with the Chicago Catholic, archdiocesan newspaper, at a later date, lives in the Diocese of Joliet, but, given the resources available in the Archdiocese of Chicago, her case was transferred to the tribunal here for investigation.
Dr. Gerald Casey, the lead medical expert in the local process, said he has been forever changed by the experience.
“It was the most enriching experience of my spiritual life,” said Casey, who lives in Wilmette and attends Sts. Faith, Hope and Charity Parish in Winnetka.
Church law has a process, much like a trial, that it follows when investigating miracles. The woman, her husband, her physician and her spiritual director all were interviewed, or deposed, during the process.
“The true spiritual experience was in the stages of the depositions. I literally cried when we were deposing her. It struck to my very heart, because I could feel a presence that I had never felt before in my life,” Casey said. “It was one thing to read the materials, but it was quite another thing to hear her recitation of what had occurred, not just during that time but in the prior pregnancies and her miscarriages.”
The stay-at-home mother’s pregnancy was considered high risk because she was over 40 and had suffered previous miscarriages. As a result, her doctor ordered blood tests on the baby early on and monitored the pregnancy closely.
She started to bleed during the pregnancy and was diagnosed in spring 2013 with a subchorionic hematoma, a blood clot in the fetal membrane. The only thing doctors can do for that condition is prescribe bed rest. If the blood clot ruptures, it can result in a spontaneous miscarriage.
Bed rest for a mom with three small children is not so easy, Casey said.
“Then the morning that the event occurred, she had gone downstairs, had made her children breakfast and started to bleed more,” he said, reading from notes he took during the mother’s deposition.
She started to hemorrhage and locked herself in the bathroom. She felt she was losing her baby. At that moment she called out, “Cardinal Newman, please stop the bleeding!”
“The bleeding immediately stopped. Immediately,” Casey said.
Afterward, the woman climbed into bed and called her doctor. He told her to come in that afternoon to see him.
“She came in the afternoon and fetal heart tones were normal and she went home. She was able to continue all normal activities for the entire rest of her pregnancy,” Casey said.
She has since gone on to have two more children through normal pregnancies. By all indications, she should have lost the baby.
As part of the process, Casey had two maternal fetal specialists also review the medical records and depositions.
“None of us had ever heard of anything like this occurring,” Casey said.
At no point were Casey or the other doctors asked if a miracle occurred. They only had to answer if there was any known medical explanation for what happened.
Oblate Father William Woestman serves as the promoter of justice in the archdiocese’s tribunal and participated in the canonical investigation of the miracle. He is also author of “Canonization: Theology, History, Process.”
“You could see it was painful for her to talk about what she went through,” Woestman said of the woman. “She was a very impressive person.”
After the local process for the miracle concluded, it was sent to Rome for another series of investigations, he explained. That outcome was revealed Feb. 13.
Saints and miracles are still relevant today, Woestman said, adding that he often thinks of the saints who prayed in Holy Name Cathedral, like Sts. John Paul II, Teresa of Kolkata and Mother Cabrini. He hopes one day Father Augustus Tolton will be added to that list.
“We all want saints we knew,” he said. “We want saints that walked on the same sidewalks we walk on or who breathed the same air we do.”

PAT SAYS

Do I believe in miracles?

Yes I do.

And I dont like it when theologians and biblical scholars try and explain away the Gospel miracles.

I have been present when miracles of healing happened to very sick people.

I believe that only God can work miracles.

But he sometimes works them when people on earth or people in heaven interceed and ask him too.

Cardinal Newman was undoubtedly a holy man and a man of great wisdom.

He was also homosexual by nature and we have no evidence that he ever acted out.

I think it was a disgrace that the church removed him from the grave he shared with the man he loved.

Two prominent Roman Catholic Church cardinals have urged an end of what they call “the plague of the homosexual agenda”, telling bishops to break their complicity over cases of sexual abuse.

In an open letter, Cardinals Burke and Brandmüller say the Church has wrongly blamed the abuse of power by clergy as the main cause of the scandals.

Instead, they say the cases involve priests who have “gone away from the truth of the Gospel”.

They also openly criticise the Pope.

Stories of sexual abuse of minors have emerged across the world and the Church has been accused of covering up crimes committed by priests.

Their letter comes on the eve of an extraordinary summit of bishops in Rome called by Pope Francis as an effort to deal with the scandals rocking the Church.

What are the cardinals saying about sex abuse?

Cardinals Raymond Burke, from the US, and Walter Brandmüller, from Germany, reject that the cases of abuse are a result of “clericalism” – a group of men abusing their power, and protecting each other.

The cardinals belong to the traditionalist wing of the Church, where many believe homosexuality is a root cause of the clerical abuse, and are both outspoken critics of Pope Francis.

“The plague of the homosexual agenda has been spread within the Church, promoted by organized networks and protected by a climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence,” they said

“Sexual abuse is blamed on clericalism. But the first and primary fault of the clergy does not rest in the abuse of power but in having gone away from the truth of the Gospel.”

In the Catholic hierarchy, cardinals are second in importance only to the pontiff, and there are currently 223 of them.

Cardinal Burke has links to former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, who will reportedly be in Rome during the summit.

Mr Burke is president of the advisory board of the right-wing Dignitatis Humanae Institute, which is setting up a leadership course with Mr Bannon’s help.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Brandmüller caused controversy last month when he blamed homosexuality for the cases of sexual abuse at the Church.

Why do they criticise the Pope?

The cardinals accuse the Pope of failing to answer questions related to whether the Church should allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion – they are currently barred.

The issue, raised in 2016 by four cardinals including Burke and Brandmüller, has caused controversy in the Church, prompting many clerics to question the Pope’s leadership.

The mention of this point completely unrelated to Thursday’s summit, and the challenge to the Pope’s authority, shows that clerics who are unhappy with Pope Francis are growing more confident, observers say.

Conservative Catholics say they are trying to uphold the Church’s teachings and morals and accuse the Pope of diluting their faith.

What’s the summit about?

The summit is to be attended by the heads of all national bishops’ conferences from more than 130 countries, who will discuss the most pressing crisis facing the modern Church

Pope Francis is under pressure over the sexual abuse cases

This is the beginning of an attempt to address a sickness that has been poisoning the Church since at least the 1980s, leaving its moral authority in tatters, BBC religion editor Martin Bashir says.

Pope Francis must also confront the assumptions, attitudes and practices that have allowed a culture of abuse to flourish, and the extent of this challenge may prove overwhelming, our correspondent adds.

The Pope called for “decisive action” when he was elected in 2013, but critics say he has not done enough to hold to account bishops who allegedly covered up abuse.

PAT SAYS

The whole issue of where sexual orientation fits into paedophilia is both complex and confusion.

Some say paedophilia is a distinct orientation?

Others say homosexual paedophiles abuse boys and heterosexual paedophiles abuse girls?

Some say priests use children because of the lack of opportunity opportunity to have adult sex?

It seems there are more paedophiles in the priesthood than in civvy street?

I do not believe that paedophilia in the church is down to the gays.

It has to be more compplex than that.

The Vatican, with all its money, and to help itself should fund an international institute of paedophilia to study paedophia exhaustively and universally.

Whatever side we are on the TRUTH about paedophilia needs to be scientifically established to give us the tools to address it psychologically, anthropologically, theologically and socially.

It is a massive issue of today.

Pope knew about McCarrick allegations but dismissed them, claims writer of new exposé

Staff Reporter

18 February, 2019

Frédéric Martel says papal entourage told him that Archbishop Viganò informed Francis about allegations involving seminarians
Archbishop Carlo Viganò told Pope Francis about allegations against Theodore McCarrick, but the Pope dismissed them because they did not concern minors, a writer has claimed in an explosive new book about the Vatican.
The book, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality and Hypocrisy, contends that there is an extensive gay sub-culture within the Vatican.
Author Frédéric Martel writes: “When the Pope dismissed the allegations, his entourage indicated to me that ‘Francis was initially informed by Viganò that Cardinal McCarrick had had homosexual relations with over-age seminarians, which was not enough to condemn him.’”
Veteran Italian journalist Marco Tosatti highlighted the passage from the book, which will be released worldwide on Thursday, February 21, on his blog.
Tosatti described the claim as a case of “friendly fire” because “if there is someone of whom Frédéric Martel speaks well, when not enthusiastically, in his long work, it is really Pope Bergoglio.”
He argued that, as a gay rights activist, Martel is not someone who shares the moral views or agenda of Archbishop Viganò, which adds a level of credibility to his words.
He wrote: “Martel, as we know, was helped and hosted by prelates in the Vatican, to carry out his task. In a television interview, he mentioned at least four high prelates close to the Pope who favoured and encouraged him. He said he had met the Director of Civiltà Cattolica, Antonio Spadaro SJ several times; in the book there is an interview with Spadaro, and an interview with Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the great director of the Synods (more or less pre-arranged) about the family and the young. He is a ‘famiglio’ of the Pontiff, a man of his trust. So we have to believe Martel, particularly because he puts the central phrase in quotes.”
Last August Archbishop Viganò published a “Testimony” in which he claimed that on June 23, 2013, he told Pope Francis: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”
When asked about the claim at an airborne press conference after his trip to Ireland, Pope Francis said: “I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and all those who are interested: read the statement carefully and make your own judgment. I will not say a single word on this.”

PAT SAYS

It is clearly emerging that Francis is an accomplice to abuse cover up.

A bishop sexually using and abusing seminarians and young priests is serious enough for his immediate removal from office.

But in McCarrick’s case the pope continued to support him and went as far as removing the sanctions Benedict placed on him.

In short Francis is an accomlpice to assault, abuse and rape.

As a result Francis sould also go.