Pell and Facts Are Victims of Culture Wars

An analysis of the 'journalistic' lynch mob mentality that motivated reporting on the Pell case and its aftermath.

From The Australian

By Chris Mitchell

The police and media campaign against him was part of the culture wars, Cardinal George Pell told Sky News’s Andrew Bolt last Tuesday. He is correct.

Policing and journalism were once dominated by Catholics, partly because both were open to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. That has changed as more women with excellent university results have joined the media and editors have hired specialist reporters from the law, finance and accounting fields.

Jack The Insider, this digital site’s Peter Hoysted, has written here and in his book, Unholy Trinity: The hunt for pedophile priest Monsignor John Day, about the history of Victoria Police protecting pedophile priests. The Age’s crime-writing doyen, John Silvester, has made the same point.

Discussing the High Court’s 7-0 quashing of Pell’s conviction, Silvester wrote on April 7: “The police record on these cases is lamentable. For many years, rather than do their job, there was
a key group of senior police who actively sabotaged prosecutions against priests.”

In the media, there was a long tradition of ignoring such stories. 

Last week, this column discussed a seven-year series about pedophilia by priests, brothers and politicians published by Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail from the mid-1990s. These stories culminated in lengthy jail sentences for abusers, and school and church payouts to victims upwards of $100m.

As Silvester wrote, “Internationally, the Catholic Church destroyed the lives of thousands of its followers. If there is a God, then they (pedophile priests) will be called to account.”

Hear, hear. Yet while it is good the media and police now take the issue of institutional child sex abuse seriously, the picture in the wider history of crime and faith is complex.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was about institutional pedophilia. Most crimes against children are committed by family members, overwhelmingly fathers and male relatives. About 90 per cent of child victims know their abuser, and 30 per cent are abused by direct family members.

Nor is institutional abuse confined to the Catholic Church. The royal commission discussed other denominations, as well as the Salvation Army and the Boy Scouts. Weeding out people
from institutions who have betrayed children should have been a media focus earlier. Yet such abusers come from institutions that have also been forces for good.

The Catholic Church educates as many as 20 per cent of all children: millions since Federation. Catholic welfare services for the elderly and the poor have long been at the forefront of social services. Ditto the welfare services of other Christian and non-Christian religions.

While a corrective to the treatment of institutional abuse was long overdue, some commentary clearly suggests the process is being hijacked by activists who see victimhood and identity as
the key drivers of social change. They are less concerned about righting wrongs than destroying institutions of power.

Just as churches have had to look hard at themselves, the High Court’s Pell ruling should force the Victorian police and legal system to look carefully at their own performance in what was
described by Silvester as the biggest media, police and judicial blunder since Lindy Chamberlain was wrongly convicted of murdering her baby girl, Azaria.

Much has been written, though little of it properly reported at the ABC, about amendments to the Victorian Evidence Act in 2006 that changed the way police and courts deal with victim testimony in allegations of sexual abuse. Father Frank Brennan, Paul Kelly, Janet Albrechtsen, Silvester and others have argued Victoria’s courts need to return to a strict application of the principle of guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Not only does Victoria need a rethink, reporters need to test allegations more vigorously before publication. Some allegations against Pell have fallen over at the first hurdle in magistrates courts when lawyers proved some never happened, Pell was not in the places described or did not have the roles alleged. Silvester and this column last week pointed to the lack of grooming in many of the 26 charges against Pell that failed early in legal proceedings.

Pell was not charged because of what he knew of offences by convicted Ballarat pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale. And yet on Twitter on Tuesday night, ABC journalist Louise Milligan
cited in response to Bolt’s Pell interview the video testimony of people abused by Ridsdale.

Nor was Pell charged over decisions to protect Ridsdale by moving him from parish to parish.

These decisions were made by the bishop of Ballarat, Ronald Mulkearns, and archbishop of Melbourne Frank Little. If redacted sections of the royal commission report suggest Pell was
involved in deciding to move Ridsdale, then further legal action will follow. But the cardinal has denied this many times.

As a junior priest in the 1970s, Pell lived for 10 months in the same presbytery as Ridsdale in East Ballarat. Pell says he knew nothing of Ridsdale’s offending at that time. Former Channel 10 political editor Paul Bongiorno lived in a presbytery in Warrnambool at the same time as Ridsdale and also says he knew nothing of Ridsdale’s offending. Why is the left-wing Bongiorno believed but the conservative Pell not?

Many journalists investigating pedophile priests do so for the right reason: justice for victims.

But some of their supporters seem to be motivated by old left-right hatreds. It is Pell’s positions as a conservative that really draw their ire. Imagine if Pell shared the views of Bongiorno on marriage, climate change, politics and conservative doctrine. Would critics such as Barrie Cassidy, David Marr, Guy Rundle, Quentin Dempster and Fran Kelly be nearly as quick to condemn him?

Cassidy last Tuesday tweeted in response to Milligan accusing Bolt of effectively protecting Pell and allowing Ridsdale’s crime to be trivialised. This was because Pell had referred to Ridsdale’s “activities”. In fact, Pell unequivocally condemned Ridsdale’s offending and the church’s handling of it.

Do such tweets suggest some journalists just assume Pell is evil? 

How else to explain Milligan’s tweet last Thursday night in response to a piece here by Greg Sheridan: “It’s a
profound insult to a decent young man who went through five years of hell ... you’re smart enough to know beyond reasonable doubt is an incredibly high bar for historical sexual matters.”

Milligan obviously believes in the journalism she has produced. 

Such belief must be underpinned by a certain view of Pell, the church and all the opportunity witnesses who testified the alleged 1996 offences against two choirboys in a St Patrick’s Cathedral sacristy could not have happened because Pell was elsewhere, the cathedral was crowded and the sacristy was too far away. Add the lack of grooming and the fact Pell would have had no idea if
the boys were the sons of judges, politicians or police commissioners.

The rejection of all such doubts suggests a cultural mindset about Pell and his church.