{"id":39,"date":"2008-07-08T13:56:56","date_gmt":"2008-07-08T13:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/australias-cardinal-law.html"},"modified":"2008-07-08T13:56:56","modified_gmt":"2008-07-08T13:56:56","slug":"australias-cardinal-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/australias-cardinal-law.html","title":{"rendered":"Australia’s Cardinal Law?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cardinal<\/span> The archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, often fills the role for the Catholic Church “Down Under” that Cardinal Bernard Law once did in Boston for the U.S. church: that is, a trenchant voice for “orthodoxy” and the commanding face of the hierarchical church, a man who could alienate many inside the church and out, including many of his fellow bishops–though he would never disappoint Rome.
\nNow Pell may have something else in common with Law, in light of the ABC News (Australia) reports of his recent failings regarding an abusive priest and his victims. Grant Gallicho at dotCommonweal has the story here<\/a>, but in brief: Pell wrote to a sexual abuse victim who had complained about a priest, Fr. Terence Goodall, who he said had sexually abused him. The man, Anthony Jones, said he was 29 at the time of the alleged rape, in 1982, and not underage. Pell said Goodall denied the charges, and Pell said he was dismissing the alleged victim’s complaint because he had no other reports of wrongdoing by Goodall. Except that Pell had another complaint against Goodall, and that same day wrote to another Goodall victim–who was a minor at the time of the assault–to acknowledge the charges. And, just three weeks earlier Pell’s own internal investigator urged him to accept the victims’ allegations.
\nWORSE STILL, ABC News got hold of documents showing that Goodall admitted to Pell that he had sexually abused a sixteen-year-old girl, and that contrary to Pell’s public assertion, Goodall was still acting publicly as a priest at least a year after he admitted to two complaints of sexual contact with a man and a boy.
\nPell doesn’t come off well in this ABC report<\/a>, defending his absolution of the priest to the victim this way: “That was poorly put. I was attempting to inform him that there was no other allegation of rape,” he said. “The incidents were run together. That was done badly.” Pell’s complaint that the man’s demand for $3.5 million was “excessive” doesn’t help matters much.
\nHere is the latest revelation <\/a>from ABC and a Herald Sun story<\/a>. All this is via the invaluable AbuseTracker<\/a>.
\nAll this comes just days before Pope Benedict arrives for World Youth Day<\/a>, the church’s chance to burnish its reputation amid declining mass attendance and other problems. The event has already been plagued by low attendance and myriad other problems, and Pell’s missteps are not likely to help.
\nLast month Pell told Sky News<\/a> that it would be appropriate for Pope Benedict XVI to voice regret for the clerical sex-abuse scandal during his visit. “I’m not expecting him to make any dramatic statements,” the cardinal told Sky News. But he added: “Certainly there’s plenty for which we’re not proud.”
\nAs often happens, the cardinal speaks volumes. One should also note that Pell led the charge against his former auxiliary, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson (now retired), whose book on the abuse crisis and reforming the church I wrote about here<\/a>. Pell may want to give it a read, too, I think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, often fills the role for the Catholic Church “Down Under” that Cardinal Bernard Law once did in Boston for the U.S. church: that is, a trenchant voice for “orthodoxy” and the commanding face of the hierarchical church, a man who could alienate many inside the church and out,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nAustralia's Cardinal Law? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/australias-cardinal-law.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Australia's Cardinal Law? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}