Miranda Devine: Cardinal’s accusers live in glass houses

AFTER Cardinal George Pell’s 19 hours in the witness box of the royal commission, there is still no evidence he was complicit in the crimes and cover-up of the Catholic Church.

RENDEZVIEW MARCH 2015 - News Corp journalist Miranda Devine. Picture: Peter Brew-Bevan

AFTER Cardinal George Pell’s 19 hours in the witness box of the child sex abuse royal commission, there is still no evidence he was complicit in the crimes and cover-up of the Catholic Church during his time as a junior priest in Ballarat.

Cardinal George Pell spent 19 hours giving evidence at the royal commission in Rome. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

The witch-hunt continued all week, however, and the hypocrisy and agendas of Pell’s media accusers was something to behold.

Inexplicably chosen as Sky News’ go-to expert on Pell, Kristina Keneally, the former NSW premier and self-described “Catholic feminist”, was one of the worst.

As an American-born “progressive”, she has always condemned Pell, a theological conservative, claiming he tried to “force the Australian Catholic Church into the shape he wanted it to be: conservative, doctrinaire, and authority-based”. In other words, no women priests, no same-sex marriage, no divorce.

She lauded as “brilliant” anti-Catholic bigot Tim Minchin’s song abusing Pell as “scum”.

Pell says he wasn’t aware of the activities of pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale, and that Bishop Ronald Mulkearns never told him what he knew.

Keneally finds Pell’s evidence implausible.

She wants to know why, as a junior priest in Ballarat, he didn’t know what Ridsdale was up to and dind’t stop the negligent (at least) Bishop Mulkearns moving him between parishes.

Yet, in 2003, when she was an upwardly mobile MP in the NSW Labor Party, her colleague Milton Orkopoulos was grooming and sexually assaulting boys, at least once in Parliament House during a Christmas party.

Orkopoulos was eventually jailed for 13 years in 2008 for child sexual abuse.

Keneally had no involvement in Orkopoulos’ activities.

Applying the same criticism she made of Pell, why didn’t Keneally know about Orkopoulos when she was a junior MP? She became leader of the party that protected him and sacked and victimised the whistleblower, his secretary Gillian Sneddon. “I was treated like I was the scum of the earth, for being a traitor to the Labor Party,” Sneddon said after winning a $440,000 judgment against the government in 2012 for bullying and harassment.

“Not one person in a position of power in this state ever took responsibility for what was always, obviously a clear wrongful act.”

In fact, two of Orkopulos’ former colleagues testified on his behalf.

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So when Keneally became premier in 2009, what did she do to investigate this recent history of child sexual abuse in her party?

Did she, like Pell, act swiftly within months? Did she inquire into how Orkopoulos could become minister for Aboriginal affairs with access to the most vulnerable children in NSW?

And what about the rampant child sexual abuse in indigenous communities and welfare traps under the nose of the Department of Community Services when she was premier? Did she investigate the systemic failure of the state apparatus which her party had controlled for 16 years?

I’m not suggesting, as she has of Pell, that Keneally was a paedophile protector. But I am highlighting the hypocrisy and unrealistic standards of Pell-haters.

Pell acted, unlike anyone else at that time in the church, against the scourge of child sexual abuse. In 1996, when he set up the Melbourne Response, priests were still raping altar boys in Boston.

It took another six years for the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting in 2002 (as depicted in the movie Spotlight) to finally force the church to action. Where were all the media heroes 30 or 40 years ago, when paedophile priests were active? Why didn’t they expose them?

It’s not an unreasonable question. The journalists at the Boston Globe asked it of themselves.

In part, it was the climate of the 1970s, a context which is missing from media reports last week. Children were not believed. Parents, not wanting further trauma and shame for their children, were reluctant to press charges. Police were reluctant to proceed, knowing cases would fail in court. Even when Ridsdale molested the son of a policeman, no charges were laid.

The euphemism “homosexuality” was used by Bishop Mulkearns to cover up why Ridsdale had to be moved to another parish. The “therapy culture” of the times led bishops to believe paedophiles could be cured by psychological “treatment”. This was the period when child entertainer and paedophile Jimmy Savile was operating with impunity at the BBC. Society was deaf, dumb and blind to the existence of child sexual abuse.

And then of course paedophiles are secretive, devious and often ­appear deceptively benign.

Then there was the shame in those days of homosexual activity. Most of the abuse before the commission is homosexual, and most (80 per cent in the US church) against adolescent boys. The shame of the victims and their families added to a culture of secrecy that allowed the exploding problem of paedophile priests to be buried.

As Pell himself said last week, describing how he was deceived by Bishop Mulkearns and others in Ballarat, it was an “extraordinary world … of crimes and cover-ups. And people did not want the status quo to be disturbed.”

Those throwing stones at Pell should look in the mirror.

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