"Peter Saunders is an abuse survivor who was appointed by Francis to sit on the Vatican's own child abuse Commission.... And he's studying Australia's Royal Commission's revelations about then Archbishop George Pell's 'Melbourne Response'.... Peter Saunders says that the 'Melbourne Response' was and is a cynical attempt to denigrate, to silence, to intimidate families who are grieving, families who are hurting... Doesn't this sound like PF is out to get Cardinal Pell?
Cardinal Mueller: Pell Conviction Irrational Allegations that led to Cardinal George Pell’s conviction for sexual abuse are “absolutely unbelievable” and “without proof,” Cardinal Gerhard Müller has said. The prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also said the conviction is “absolutely against all reason and justice” and resembles an understanding of justice going back to the time of King Henry VIII. “Like everyone else, I cannot see the culpability,” Cardinal Müller told the Register March 4. ..... “Nobody witnessed it,” Cardinal Müller noted, and said that he could not believe it could happen with “all the other persons” probably present after Mass. The German cardinal said the crime was “supposed to have taken place not in a private house, but in the public cathedral.” “The allegations against him are absolutely unbelievable, it’s impossible. It’s without proof, against all evidence,” Cardinal Müller said. “If there’s no proof, you cannot condemn a person to 50 years in a fortress,” he continued. “It’s an understanding of justice that goes back to the time of Henry VIII,” and “shows a corruption of the juridical system in mainstream public opinion,” he said. http://m.ncregister.com/blog/edward...lls-conviction-against-all-reason-and-justice
And this railroading to hopefully make those in places of change disappear and/or be humiliated and disgraced. Also consider the source of this report. Here Comes Pell’s Sentencing March 12, 2019 by sd From The New York Times: MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The most senior Catholic convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison for molesting two choirboys in an Australian cathedral in a crime the judge said showed “staggering arrogance.” Cardinal George Pell must serve a minimum of 3 years and 8 months before he is eligible for parole, according to the judge’s order. The five convictions against Pell carried a maximum possible sentence of 10 years each. “In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance,” Victoria state County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd said in handing down the sentence. ................ The 77-year-old denies the allegations and will appeal his convictions in the Victoria Court of Appeal on June 5. It was not immediately clear if he will also appeal the sentence. For the first time in Pell’s many court appearances since he returned to Australia from the Vatican to face abuse charges, Pell wore an open-necked shirt without a cleric’s collar. He was also not wearing a cardinal’s gold ring, which might reflect strict rules on jewelry in the state penal system. In explaining his sentencing decision, the judge said Pell had led an “otherwise blameless life.” Kidd said he believed given Pell’s age and lack of any other criminal record, the cardinal posed no risk of re-offending. The judge also took pains to note that he was sentencing Pell for the offenses on which the cardinal had been convicted — and not for the sins of the Catholic Church. “As I directed the jury who convicted you in this trial, you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church,” Kidd said. But the judge also said that Pell had abused his position of power and had shown no remorse for his crimes. Kidd described the assaults as egregious, degrading and humiliating to the victims. Pell showed no emotion during the hourlong hearing and barely moved throughout. He stood silently with his hands behind his back as the judge read his sentence. Pell signed documents that registered him for life as a serious sexual offender before he was led from the dock by four prison officers. ....... The judge said Pell’s age was a significant factor in determining his sentence. Pell suffers from hypertension that is exacerbated by stress and has a dual-chamber pacemaker, the judge said. Pell used a cane to leave the court, after having both knees surgically replaced in December. Pell’s sentencing comes on the sixth anniversary of Francis’ election as pope. Pell was in the conclave that elected him and remains eligible for any potential future conclave until age 80 or unless he is removed. Asked by a reporter outside court after the sentencing whether the case against Pell amounted to a witch hunt, his lawyer Robert Richter gave a rueful smile. “No comment — you be the judge,” Richter replied. MORE: https://apnews.com/abf7cb68a8fb4c8a849e51e6e87207b1 Prayers.
I think that the contents of this article, from a reliable secular source, puts the Cardinal's conviction into considerable doubt (at the very least) and I am heartened to have read it. I hope that his appeal is successful and that he returns to the Vatican to continue his financial work. https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/the-fanciful-testimony-that-convicted-george-pell/ (Contents of an email from Ben Forshaw of Friends of the Suffering Souls 12 May 2019) Gloria TV news reports that the Cardinal has been encouraged by cards and letters coming in from all over the world – here If you have not contacted him I would encourage you to do so, or even to send another card in honour of Our Lady Help of Christians. That Feast Day is 24 May. Our Lady Help of Christians is Patroness of Australia. It is also the title under which St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney was consecrated. Please remember the Cardinal in any novena you make to OLHC. To send a card/letter to support/encourage Cardinal Pell here is the address again: CARDINAL GEORGE PELL C/O Melbourne Assessment Prison, 317-353 Spencer St, West Melbourne, Victoria 3003, AUSTRALIA
From: https://abyssum.org/2019/06/08/at-l...cardinal-george-pell-is-beginning-to-surface/ I hear great news out of Australia, where Cardinal George Pell’s appeal on his child abuse conviction was heard by a court tribunal today. Daily Telegraph journalist Miranda Devine writes that the government’s cast collapsed. Her column is behind a paywall, but here is an excerpt: Cardinal George Pell and his supporters were relieved that his appeal of his child sexual assault conviction was live-streamed on Wednesday. The intense seven-hour courtroom argument was the first time the public has heard first-hand the flimsiness of the evidence against him. Three judges of the Victorian Appeals Court are reviewing the jury’s verdict in which Cardinal Pell was convicted of sexually assaulting two choir boys after Sunday Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in December 1996. One of the boys has since died and told his mother he never was molested. So that leaves the conviction to be based on the word of one man against Cardinal Pell’s, with no corroborating evidence, no forensic evidence, no witnesses, and against a mountain of contrary evidence which showed that the allegations were highly improbable, if not impossible. The jury verdict has troubled legal experts and lay people around the world ever since. The evidence seen so far leads to the conclusion that an innocent man was jailed to atone for the sins of others in a church plagued by sexual abuse scandals. From what I’m told, the state’s case was routed, though we won’t know the verdict for months. Meanwhile, Cardinal Pell remains jailed in Melbourne. In 2014, Pell was given by Pope Francis responsibility for cleaning up the infamously corrupt Vatican Bank. When that news broke, I thought, “They’ll find some way to take him out. They won’t let him do it.” When the child abuse charges were brought against Pell in 2017, I thought, “So that’s how they did it.” But I didn’t go further, because how would I prove that Pell was set up? It was just a hunch. When I was in Australia last month, I found myself in a conversation one evening with someone about all this. (I had a lot of Pell conversations, as you might imagine.) I shared with my interlocutor my suspicion that Pell was set up to take him off the Vatican Bank case. The man across the table said, “That’s interesting. You may not know it, but the ‘Ndrangheta is quite well established in Australia, especially in Victoria. That’s where the cardinal was charged.” The ‘Ndrangheta is the Calabrian mafia, and yes, they are well established in Australia. They control organized crime on Australia’s East Coast, and are said to have infiltrated every part of the Australian establishment. With that in mind,here’s an interesting bit of news, from the Irish Times, Nov. 16, 2013: Senior Calabrian Mafia investigator Nicola Gratteri, whose investigative zeal has forced him to live with police protection since 1989, has said the pope’s plans to reform Vatican structures, including the Vatican bank, the IOR, could prove a problem for the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s most powerful Mafia. He said that while Pope John Paul II called on the “military” mafiosi to “repent” in 1993, Pope Francis has gone further, perhaps hitting the ’Ndrangheta where it hurts. “He has named his G8 [council of cardinals] to overhaul the entire structure of the Vatican, including a review of the Vatican’s economic affairs and in particular, the IOR,” Gratteri says. “For those with real economic power it is obvious this could be a huge disadvantage . . . Given that in the past we’ve had collusion at the highest level between church and Mafia, this exposes the pope.” Months after this report, Cardinal George Pell was named by Francis to reform the IOR. In 2014, Pell said his team found nearly two billion euros hidden away in various Vatican accounts, off the balance sheets. In November 2015, with the Pope’s approval, Pell issued new guidelines for running all Vatican offices, to bring them up to international standards for financial transparency. In April 2016, without consulting Pell, the Vatican Secretary of State suspends an external audit of Vatican finances. The National Catholic Register quotes an unnamed source as saying that officials are afraid of what the audit will find, and want to get rid of Pell. A year later, Pell was charged in Melbourne with sexual abuse. And that was the end of the Pell threat to the Vatican Bank insiders. This mafia thing, it could all be a coincidence, and in any case, there are other factors in play in the persecution of George Pell, who was widely hated by Australian anti-clericalists. But it’s curious all the same. George Pell was the No. 1 enemy of the ‘Ndrangheta in the Vatican, and he showed early on in his tenure, when he uncovered all the hidden euros, that he meant business. Now George Pell sits in solitary confinement in a prison cell in Melbourne, convicted on pathetically shabby charges. The old guard in the Vatican won. The world is as it always was. UPDATE: I have been told by someone very much in a position to know that the current head of the Vatican Bank is from Calabria. For what it’s worth…
Great news, I felt very sorry for Pell today when I read he was spending his birthday behind bars and seeing that photo of him in hand cuffs. Lets pray some more for Cardinal Pell.
Questions Persist About Vatican Finances, Real Estate Many of the issues identified as problematic are still in play, according to informed sources who spoke with the Register. Edward Pentin VATICAN CITY — By October 2016, two years into his term as prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy, Cardinal George Pell had become aware of a Vatican dicastery handling large amounts of unregistered cash in offshore accounts. But nearly three years later the questions raised by Cardinal Pell about the management of Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), the dicastery which handles the Vatican’s real estate and financial assets, have seemingly gone unanswered. Pell had identified money laundering and fraud risks related to the APSA’s use of foreign bank accounts and had questioned particular asset and real estate transactions. Keen to move swiftly ahead with Pope Francis’ mandate to root out mismanagement and possible corruption in Vatican financial operations, the cardinal prefect contacted Australian banking friends in London in 2016 to find out more. They estimated that possibly as much as €100 million could be held in these accounts, primarily in the branches of two private banks located in Lugano, Switzerland. Cardinal Pell responded by saying he would ask a Swiss law firm to first collect bank statements going back 10 years of one of these accounts, and to have the Vatican’s auditor general, Libero Milone, a former partner with Deloitte, a multinational financial auditing and consultancy firm, inspect them. To do this, Pell had to ask in writing for Pope Francis’ permission, which the Holy Father duly gave him with a simple signature. Yet the bank statements never made it to Cardinal Pell or Milone — both of whom subsequently departed from their Vatican positions. An alleged sexual abuse scandal overshadowed the cardinal, and a barrage of accusations besieged Milone, but a year later Vatican officials exonerated the auditor following an internal investigation that failed to produce evidence to support the accusations. Sources say the initiative to obtain the bank statements was most likely sabotaged after certain individuals became aware of the inquiry. Officials at APSA often used the excuse that they were having difficulty obtaining the data when asked for information pertaining to these accounts. “They were delaying it, having ‘problems,’” said one of two informed sources in comments to the Register. “Effectively they were shielding the accounts.” A major part of the resistance, the Register has learned, is that much of the money was kept in “ciphered accounts” which the Promontory Financial Group — one of several outside contractors brought in to help clean up Vatican finances — warned in 2014 were a money laundering and fraud risk that needed to be addressed. While many of the accounts are now thought to be closed, it remains unclear exactly how many there were or if any are still operating. (Promontory believed there were at least six accounts generating potentially problematic activity). Although Cardinal Pell’s former dicastery, now headed by former APSA deputy Msgr. Luigi Mistò, is in charge of vigilance and control over APSA, sources say it appears unlikely that the dicastery will ever know the precise amounts that were held in these accounts, or to whom they belonged. Read the rest at: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edwa...nagement-of-vaticans-financial-and-real-estat +
St Michael with the direction of the Holy Spirit, PURGE US, this your Church!! Have mercy on us!! I feel like we need a flame thrower, in one swift swipe. Yes, you can laugh at that if you like. A little levity is healthy.
I find it exceedingly curious that thousands of highly placed churchmen with accusations against them just skate away but the Cardinal who took his job seriously and found gross financial improprieties and many unanswered questions is suddenly prosecuted with full wrath of the law on VERY flimsy evidence. Not a good look for the Vatican or Australian justice.
We mustn't forget him. We have to pray for all those fighting the good fight in this terrible time. It's takes great faith and courage. Cardinal Pell: ‘Amazon or no Amazon, the Church cannot allow any confusion’ In a handwritten letter from prison, the cardinal said he was 'disturbed' by preparations for the Amazon synod Cardinal George Pell has written a letter thanking supporters for their prayers and saying he is “disturbed” by the preparations for the forthcoming synod on the Amazon. The text of the two-page, handwritten letter – images of which were shared with CNA and confirmed by sources close to Pell – has been circulated amongst a group of Pell’s closest supporters in Australia. In the letter, dated from Melbourne Assessment Prison on August 1, the cardinal also says that he has been sustained in his incarceration by his faith and by the prayers of the faithful, and that he is offering his suffering in prison for the good of the Church. “The knowledge that my small suffering can be used for good purposes through being joined to Jesus’ suffering gives me purpose and direction,” Pell writes in the letter. “Challenges and problems in Church life should be confronted in a similar spirit of faith.” Pell goes on to say that “we have reason to be disturbed by the Instrumentum Laboris of the Amazonian Synod,” which was published in June ahead of the October meeting. That document, which has been the source of considerable discussion and commentary, included discussion on the subject of ordaining so-called viri probati, or “proven men” who are married, to answer a shortage of priestly vocations. The working document, which calls for “a Church with an indigenous face,” further recommends that the synod identify “an official ministry that can be conferred upon women, taking into account the central role they play in the Amazonian church.” “This is not the first low-quality document the Synod secretariat has produced,” Pell writes. The cardinal, apparently in reference to the considerable debate and criticism sparked by the synod’s proposed agenda – which has also included some calls for changes to the matter used to celebrate the Mass – also notes that “Cardinal G. Müller, formerly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has written an excellent critique.” “I am no expert on the region,” Pell says, though noting he has travelled to parts of the region, but cautions that “as in the Amazon, a lot of water has yet to run before the Synod.” “One point is fundamental, the Apostolic Tradition, the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles, taken from the New Testament and taught by Popes and Councils, by the Magisterium, is the only criterion doctrinally for all teaching on doctrine and practice.” “Amazon or no Amazon, in every land, the Church cannot allow any confusion, much less any contrary teaching, to damage the Apostolic Tradition,” he said. The cardinal emphasized the need for unity in the essentials of Christ’s teaching, while also calling for charity in all things. “We must always remember that the Church is one, not just in the sense that good families stick together, whatever their differences, but because the Church of Christ is based in the Catholic Church, which is the body of Christ.” Following his conviction in the County Court of Victoria on five counts of child sexual abuse in December last year, Pell was sentenced in March to six years in prison, of which he must serve at least three years and eight months. Legal experts and commentators have discussed the weight of evidence produced against Pell during the trial, noting that the conviction rests solely on the testimony of one of Pell’s alleged victims. Attention has also been drawn to the plausibility of Pell’s apparent crimes, in which he is supposed to have sexually abused two teenage boys simultaneously in the Melbourne cathedral sacristy after Mass, at a time when the space would have been both crowded with people and exposed to view. The verdict was immediately appealed by Pell’s legal team and the cardinal has remained in prison since that time. On June 5-6, judges at the Supreme Court of Victoria heard Pell’s appeal against the jury’s decision. After extensive arguments from both sides, prosecutors appeared to falter under questioning by the judges. Led by court president Justice Chris Maxwell, the lead counsel for the prosecution struggled to account for what the judge called the “wildly improbable” circumstances of Pell’s alleged crimes. The judges have been considering their decision since the June hearing. Sources close to the case told CNA that a decision is expected within the next two weeks. In the letter, Pell says that he has received between 1500-2000 messages of support during his time in prison, and that he intends to answer all of them. The prayers and letters of the faithful, he said, “bring immense consolation, humanly and spiritually.” “My faith in the Lord, like yours, is a source of strength.” https://catholicherald.co.uk/news/2...amazon-the-church-cannot-allow-any-confusion/
