Cardinal George Pell is the victim of a vicious witch hunt

CARDINAL George Pell is the victim of one of the most vicious witch hunts to disgrace this country. It is shameful. Disgusting. Frightening, writes Andrew Bolt.

Pell is the victim of a vicious witch hunt

CARDINAL George Pell is the victim of one of the most vicious witch hunts to disgrace this country. It is shameful. Disgusting. Frightening.

People pretending to be moral have competed with each other to slime Pell as the defender of paedophiles, if not a paedophile himself.

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There is no mercy and no attention to the facts. There is just the joy of hatred. Check the snarling glee on the face of comedian Tim Minchin as he sang a hymn of hatred to Pell on Channel 10’s The Project on Tuesday.

“Scum,” he called Pell, who is too ill to fly from Rome to give evidence (for the third time) to our royal commission into child sex abuse.

“Coward,” he jeered, vilifying Pell for more than four minutes of prime-time television, falsely portraying him as a defender — even a friend — of paedophile priests.

(Note to Project host Waleed Aly: would you have screened four minutes of unbridled hatred for a Muslim cleric?)

Meanwhile, the ABC promoted a crowd-funding effort by Project presenters to raise the money to send former victims to Rome to “confront” the cardinal with “face-to-face contact”.

To stoke up hatred of Pell, it also published a mocked-up picture of the cardinal driving a car of huge rock-spiders, code for paedophiles.

ABC News also falsely claimed “the commission has heard from child abuse victim David Ridsdale that Cardinal Pell tried to bribe him to keep quiet” about his abuse by his uncle — when Ridsdale in fact told the commission, “I never have said that he bribed me”.

Tim Minchin sang a hymn of hatred to Cardinal Pell on Channel 10’s ‘The Project’.

And many media outlets sternly reported Pell wouldn’t “face the victims” in person at the royal commission, without adding he’d faced victims repeatedly.

Pell has met victims privately and twice given evidence with victims present — to the royal commission and a Victorian inquiry into child sex abuse.

Indeed, in 1996 he became the first senior person here, in church or in government, to confront the horror of sexual abuse of children.

Only three months after becoming archbishop of Melbourne, he created the Melbourne Response to help victims. No bishop of any other church had done anything like it.

Yet no insult of this man has been enough in a campaign of public denigration, even dehumanisation.

Channel 9’s 60 Minutes interviewed an English abuse victim who’d never met Pell and seemed uninformed on crucial details yet still felt free to defame him as “a dangerous individual” and “almost sociopathic” with a “catalogue of denigrating people”.

I know Pell. “Sociopathic” is a lie.

But this is the mob at its most vile: each person feeling licensed by the brutality of the rest to be brutal, too.

If “everybody else” hates someone, then that person must deserve hating. You can surrender your own judgment and conscience and give in to the pure pleasure of unbridled hatred, disguised as moral righteousness.

Viciousness dressed as morality: is there anything sweeter to the stupid, the resentful and the bully? Ask the “godly” who murdered the “witches” of Salem. Ask the jihadists who now behead “infidels”. Pell’s accusers are not violent but flirt with that same pitiless sanctimony.

“Die Pell,” urged a headline on The Age’s Facebook page and many of those now demanding he fly here don’t seem to mind if he does.

The Sydney Morning Herald published snide items urging Pell to get on a plane, despite being told by cardiologists that Pell’s medical advisers were right — it could kill the 74-year-old, given his heart problems.

No mercy in The Age, though. “Unwilling to trust his God,” sneered one headline.

Former NSW Labor premier Kristina Keneally even taunted: “Jesus said there is no greater love than to lay down your life for another.”

Nor did anyone seem to care that Pell will give exactly the same evidence from Rome he would give if he flew here. He is not fleeing justice like, say, Julian Assange, the hero of this same Left.

Gerald Ridsdale appears on video link at the royal commission.

No, the mob is just hungry for a scapegoat and wants Pell close enough to humiliate.

It’s the primitive moral calculus of the tribalist: that an injustice to one side can be made good with an injustice to the other.

It’s enough that Pell is now our most senior member of the Catholic Church, which once betrayed so many children.

But what makes him an even better target for the Left is that’s he’s a conservative who has defended traditional marriage, attacked global warming alarmism and correctly seen the green faith as a competitor to his own.

He’ll do, they cry.

How Pell has, as a human being, survived their onslaught astonishes me. Worst of all, he was falsely accused of having himself abused a boy when a young priest, although an inquiry that later looked into this highly dubious claim found no proof of any such thing.

It’s continued. A former child victim of one Ballarat priest claimed in the royal commission that in 1969 Pell heard him pleading for help but did nothing — only for Pell to later produce his passport, showing he’d been in Rome that year.

But people such as Minchin still claim the young Pell must have known his then Ballarat housemate and fellow priest, Gerald Ridsdale, was abusing children — an allegation Pell denies. Yet none question the word of another young priest who shared a house with Ridsdale, Paul Bongiorno, a Leftist and now ABC commentator, who says he had no idea, either. “Ridsdale never came to the presbytery in Warrnambool and said, ‘Guess how many boys I’ve raped today?’,” Bongiorno said. “They hide it.”

And they hid it from Pell, who has repeatedly denied on oath protecting paedophiles or keeping crimes hidden.

Justice Peter McClellan at the royal commission.

Neither of the two inquiries so far has yet found proof that he’s lying. Even Gerald Ridsdale, the worst of the paedophile priests, failed to incriminate Pell in the royal commission last year.

His evidence, suggesting Pell knew nothing, seemed to anger the royal commission. Justice Peter McClellan even warned Ridsdale the commission could find out who visited him in jail before he’d given evidence, which seemed to suggest McClellan had expected more damning stuff from Ridsdale and suspected he’d been nobbled.

In fact, the royal commission has throughout seemed only too ready to doubt Pell’s word whenever his recollection conflicted with his accusers’.

It has also asked Pell to give evidence three times in what is now becoming a punishment by process.

Pell knows his church betrayed many children and protected the priests who preyed on them. He knows he could have handled the scandal better, but nothing I’ve seen so far shows he protected paedophiles.

Nothing.

If that changes, I will damn him then, but right now there is proof of only this: a witch hunt to destroy an innocent man for the sins of others.

Shame on every coward who joins this vicious mob. You claim you stand for good, yet you show such gloating evil.