I see Cardinal Pell has been charged by the Australian Police with child abuse. The Cardinal is the third ranking Church Official in the world and as such can be considered Pope Francis's next to right hand man. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40439489 https://www.theguardian.com/austral...ge-pell-charged-with-multiple-sexual-offences
Cardinal Pell strikes me as a Orthodox and holy shepherd and I believe he is innocent of these charges. He's had a target on his back ever since he make of fool of that false prophet Richard Dawkins some time ago:
Poor Cardinal Pell. I hope he is not guilty of any wrong doing with these charges. Regarding this video,he made a real modernist mess of the true account of Adam and Eve.Very disappointing.Dawkins made him look like a fool.Or rather ,Pell makes himself a fool.
He is entitled to a presumption of innocence until the court verdict, I suppose. But why had the Pope placed someone actively under investigation for child abuse by the police in the third highest postion in the Church in the first place? The mind fairly boggles.
Of course none of us know of the alleged doings, but one thing we do know, or better know, is that innocent faithful Christians are and will be persecuted more and more as the world turns darker and darker. I am not sure how to prepare for this other than prayer and fasting. I pray Cardinal Pell is found innocent of these grave charges, but at some time Christians will stand within the courts of injustice for the very reason they will be opposed to the things of the world.
I have always thought that the investigation into the alledged sex offences of Cardinal Pell were false and even a conspiracy by the ultra left [in the church and by the political powers that be] to blacken Cardinal Pell's name. As an Australian I have always been proud of our Australian Cardinal Pell, because of his tough stance on child sex abuse in the church and his no nonsence stance on the gay agenda. I watched the above documentary and realise now, that my interpretations of Cardinal Pell, were nothing more than just my own need to believe that at least some of the Catholic prelates of today are untainted by the pressures of this mad world!; when really it applies to all! I am now convinced that Cardinal Pell is in fact a conniving and devious paedophile! It now seems that there is not just one deranged witness! [which I believed was the only alledged victim!] but a whole range of established and collaborating witnesses! [and really, the ultra left, mind altering agents] could not have gotten to all of these people, so Cardinal Pell has much to answer for! How gullible have I been! The whole catholic church is and has been corrupt for a long time!, it seems! I'm now starting to rethink my disdain and my contempt for protestants! Lord have Mercy on any real Catholics out there! Is there any? If so I am hoping I am one!
I do not assume he is guilty. But neither do I assume him to be innocent. We shall see. I am afraid my time for assuming that clergymen are always innocent has long, long since passed me by,.
Still I think he is innocent. One thing is very clear and that is that the Victoria police in Australia are very far from innocent, a lot of allegations out there including about politicians too...
Here in the US the organization Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests was recently indited on 24 counts of kickbacks by attorneys for lawsuits against the Church. This organization has sued the Church to the tune of around 3 billion dollars. http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/n...wsuit-claims-major-misbehavior-at-snap-35646/ "According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff oversaw the fundraising for SNAP’s trip to The Hague where the group filed charges against Pope Benedict XVI in the International Criminal Court. SNAP, together with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, had asked the court to investigate Pope Benedict and other Vatican leaders for crimes against humanity related to sex abuse by U.S. clergy." I hope that this man is innocent and will be vindicated. Many people are and have been using this issue to defund the Church and worse discredit it. In the hope of destroying it completely.
There is no doubt clergy sexual abuse is real. There is no doubt some have developed scams for profit as well. I hope and pray that justice will be served on all sexual abusers and that truth prevails. It is a horrible abomination. This stuff makes me sick and plenty mad.
I am happy to assume he is innocent till proved guilty. I would not be happy to assume him innocent whether or not the Courts find him guilty. I have an open mind.
It is crazy just how bad things are. When God gave satan 100 years to destroy the church, did that result in satan flooding the church with these horrible things ? Or were there as many crimes and abuses in the previous centuries ?
Yes. For me too. On the one hand nothing surprises me any more. On the other hand if they are trying to vilify an innocent man I pray the evil will spring back upon them. Many many years ago I heard allegations against Fr Ritter who founded Covenant House for runaways. He was doing such good work. I refused to believe it. And then---the proof started mounting. I lost my innocence in a sense that day. Now I just watch and pray.
Stay strong Josephite. We WILL get through this. Our faith is being savagely attacked and that was the plan all along. We mustn't let the evil that is blasting from every direction in the Church and in the world send us running from the Cross. The Church as the Mystical Body is inviolate but she is enduring the Passion in the footsteps of her Bridegroom. It will get darker before it gets lighter but then oh what a light we will see. Hang tough dear one. Put up the shield of Faith and extinguish the fiery darts of the evil one.
I just watched the video and I can well understand your outrage and pain. This is horrifying to watch. I couldn't finish it. But what I wrote in my first response still stands. Be strong in faith. Corrupt priests are not the Church. They are satan's tool for destroying faith. Our Blessed Mother warned at Quito Ecuador and at LaSalette and Fatima that the middle of the 20th century would see the rise of a tide of evil like we have never seen before. She told us it was coming so wecould hang on to her and get through it. Hang on!!
Church rocked by sex assault charges against top cardinal Angus MACKINNON, with Glenda Kwek in Sydney AFPJune 29, 2017 Australian Cardinal George Pell, a top aide to Pope Francis, has been charged with several sex offences in Australia (AFP Photo/Andreas SOLARO) Vatican finance chief Cardinal George Pell said Thursday that he would return to Australia to try to clear his name after becoming the most senior Catholic cleric to be charged with criminal offences linked to the Church's long-running sexual abuse scandal. Pell was ordered to appear on July 18 at court in Melbourne for a preliminary hearing on multiple sexual assault charges related to offences allegedly committed decades ago, when he was a senior cleric in his homeland. Pope Francis granted Pell a leave of absence, making it clear the cardinal would not be forced to resign his post as head of the Vatican's powerful economic ministry. Claiming he had been the victim of a campaign of "relentless character assassination", Pell vowed to beat the charges and return to work in Rome. "I am looking forward finally to having my day in court. I am innocent of these charges," the 76-year-old said. "They are false. The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me." In a supportive statement, the Vatican noted Francis's respect for the Australian's "honesty" and "energetic dedication" to his work on Church financial reform. "The Holy See expresses its respect for the Australian justice system that will have to decide the merits of the questions raised," the statement said. "Cardinal Pell has openly and repeatedly condemned as immoral and intolerable the acts of abuse committed against minors; has cooperated in the past with Australian authorities... and finally, as a diocesan bishop in Australia, has introduced systems and procedures both for the protection of minors and to provide assistance to victims of abuse." But Marie Collins, an Irish survivor of clerical sex abuse, said Francis should never have appointed Pell, given his failure to address abuses carried out by priests under his charge. While Pell deserves to benefit from the presumption of innocence over his own conduct, "it has been proved he is guilty of the appalling mishandling of cases of abuse when still in place in Australia and causing untold pain to the victims in those cases," Collins wrote on her blog. - Multiple complainants - Vatican watchers said it was unlikely Pell would ever return to his post given the time it will likely take for his case to come to trial and be completed. The cardinal is already a year past the age at which Holy See employees are supposed to retire and suffers from a heart condition. Pell was missing from a mass Francis gave for five new cardinals on Thursday and will not appear at any public events in Rome before his departure for Australia, the Vatican confirmed. Police in the Australian state of Victoria said Pell had been charged with "historical sexual assault offences". Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton said there were "multiple complainants" but provided no details as to the precise nature of the charges, or the age of the alleged victims. A lawyer for two unidentified men who had made abuse claims against Pell said they were "over the moon". "It's been very difficult for them to stick their neck out," the lawyer, Ingrid Irwin, told Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper. "To come out against someone who is second to God, in some people's minds, has caused all sorts of problems for them." SNAP, a US-based network of survivors of clerical abuse, praised the Australian authorities' action. "We hope it will inspire other countries to follow in their footsteps," spokeswoman Joelle Casteix said. "Sexual abuse thrives when it is allowed to flourish in secrecy." - 'Mucked up' - The announcement of the charges against Pell coincided with the final stages of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, ordered in 2012 after a decade of pressure to investigate widespread allegations of institutional paedophilia. The commission has spoken to thousands of survivors and heard claims of child abuse involving churches, orphanages, sporting clubs, youth groups and schools. Pell appeared before the commission three times, once in person and twice via video-link from Rome. In one hearing, he admitted that he "mucked up" in dealing with paedophile priests in Victoria state in the 1970s. The Pell charges stem from investigations by a police task force into allegations emanating from the Royal Commission and from a state parliamentary inquiry. The commission said in February that seven percent of Catholic priests were accused of abusing children in Australia between 1950 and 2010 but that the allegations were never investigated. It found that 4,444 alleged incidents of paedophilia were reported to church authorities and, in some dioceses, more than 15 percent of priests were perpetrators. Widespread abuse has also been uncovered in recent decades in other countries with large Catholic communities, badly tarnishing the standing of the Church in Ireland and North America in particular. Francis came to office four years ago promising zero tolerance and an end to Church cover-ups of the kind portrayed in "Spotlight" the 2015 Oscar-winning drama about the Boston Globe's exposure of unpunished abuse in its local diocese in the early noughties. But critics say he has made little headway, leaving the Church still reluctant to hand paedophile priests over to civilian authorities.
Yes but when one believes in the character of a person, because they appear to stand for what is right, and for the truth and for justice and then you find out it was all an orchestrated deception, craftily connived and manipulated, so as to appear to be someone they are not.........it not only shatters your perception but it also seems to laughingly rip reality from under you! My impression of Cardinal Pell was of a good and holy man of God! I even believed him to be very holy and under unjust attack and a great hope for the Catholic world! However we seem to be swimming against a tsunami! We can do nothing more than to continue to pray and sacrifice for him, and for our Holy Father and for our poor little catholic church, that is now dressed in rags!
Yes, it did happen in previous centuries. I remember reading something online that the punishments were severe during the middle ages, e.g. public floggings, being put in the stocks, etc. I tried searching for that article but couldn't find it. In my search I came across a Catholic Family News website with a very interesting article on this topic which shows that it was a serious problem addressed by St. Peter Damien in his treatise "The Book of Gomorrah" which he presented to Pope Leo IX in the early part of that Pope's reign c. 1050. There's some very disheartening reading in the Part 11 of the article on the CFN website with some background information on the rise of the homosexual influence in the Church, particularly in the US. I had never come across that website before so don't know how reliable is their information other than that St. Peter Damien's treatise can be found on the New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia website. I didn't real all of the article because there's a limit to the depressing news I can bear. I didn't watch the video about Cardinal Pell for the same reason. Here's a link to the article: http://www.cfnews.org/page88/files/f997466d5b53f7493c9f8365942bd69c-388.html In Ireland the scandals in the Church first came to light with publicity about prominent clerics having affairs with women. That resulted in a call for married priests to solve the problem. Then the child abuse scandals broke. I wouldn't be surprised to see calls for same-sex married priests as a solution to these ongoing sexual abuse scandals. Nobody ever raises the question of sin and satan's influence. During my search I also came across this news article about a very weird case in Israel dating back to 2012. Although unrelated to the topic of this thread, it's so peculiar I wondered what others would make of it:. I also wonder whatever was the outcome of it: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/117839/panic-in-jerusalem
