Andrew Bolt: The day I gave in to mob rule
SINCE I was a boy, I have had a fear of surrendering to a mob — as I finally did yesterday, writes Andrew Boltfrom the George Pell hearings in Rome.
Andrew Bolt
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SINCE I was a boy, I have had a fear of surrendering to a mob — as I finally did on Wednesday.
How could I have forgotten myself — more than 40 years after writing my first published work — about not standing up to a pack attack?
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Here are the last lines of that mawkish poem I wrote when I was 13, published in a national anthology called Youth Writes:
But fear sealed my mouth,
Held me back.
And soon I was yelling with the rest.
Yet on Wednesday, surrendering to fear, I did yell with the rest — the rest of that pitiless pack called journalists.
My God, it was sweet. For once, I trended on Twitter with praise, not venom. For once, I appeared on TV panel show where everyone else agreed with me.
For one giddy day, I felt the joy of being a David Marr or a Robert Manne, praised for the fury of my sanctimonious denunciation of a man I had reduced to the crudest caricature.
Former NSW premier Kristina Keneally even tweeted, in rare admiration, that I had been more savage on Pell than she.
On Monday night, Cardinal George Pell had appeared in a hotel room in Rome to again give evidence to the royal commission into child abuse in institutions. Within minutes, the Vatican No.3 put his big foot in his mouth.
Gail Furness, SC, assisting the commission, suggested that it was “common knowledge” in Inglewood that their priest, Gerald Ridsdale, was abusing boys. Furness had been trying to build a case, or impression, that Pell, strangely, had been one of the few then not to know Ridsdale was a paedophile.
Here, to show how wrong I was, is Pell’s full response:
“I didn’t know whether it was common knowledge (in Inglewood) or whether it wasn’t. It is a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me. The suffering, of course, was real and I very much regret that, but I had no reason to turn my mind to the extent of the evils that Ridsdale had perpetrated.”
A Sydney Morning Herald headline read: “George Pell: Ridsdale abuse ‘wasn’t of much interest to me’.” Most coverage took the same line. That heartless bastard Pell.
Yet could any sane person seriously believe — on reflection — that Pell was not only uninterested in a fellow priest raping children, but felt relaxed about confessing that to a royal commission that seems keen to crucify him?
Reader, I did think that.
I have excuses. I mean, imagine how it feels to defend a man that the mob screams is a protector of paedophiles, if not allegedly a paedophile himself. You fear: What if Pell is indeed proved evil?
How terrible for your reputation to have covered for him. The abuse!
And it’s worse here in Rome. A journalist defending Pell is a unicorn in this media pack. Many are on first-name terms with the victims.
So then Pell says something so dumb that you panic, and do not take the time to replay the tape and reflect.
You jump ship.
So, yes, I did on Wednesday feed the fantasy that Pell is — as some polemicists and victims claim — almost a “sociopath”, totally lacking in empathy.
But look again at Pell’s words. Wasn’t he just trying to say he had no particular reason then, as a priest in Ballarat, to suspect that the priest at Inglewood was a paedophile, and thus had no interest in his doings?
In fact, Pell’s evidence to the commission is that he knew nothing of Ridsdale’s crimes until years later.
Of course, the strong suggestion from questioning by Furness and commission head Peter McClellan is that Pell is just a brazen liar.
On Wednesday, for instance, Furness attacked Pell’s “extraordinary” defence that he had been repeatedly lied to, by Ballarat bishop Ronald Mulkearns and then by archbishop Frank Little in Melbourne, about paedophile priests they were protecting and moving from parish to parish and school to school.
Pell argued they and their officials had kept from him the complaints against such priests, and the reason they were being moved.
McClellan protested that Pell’s claim “makes no sense”— yet it would have had Pell been more open about the bitch-fest he’d walked into in Melbourne when the Vatican forced him as an auxiliary bishop on the unwilling Little.
Pell was a conservative, Little more a “progressive”.
Worse, Pell was the Vatican’s favourite to replace Little, and Little was not keen to give him ammunition. Yet it is Pell who is cast by the media as the prime fall guy for the paedophile catastrophe.
I said on Wednesday that Pell was dangerously incurious, and I stick by that.
Pell, himself, conceded that he should, with hindsight, have been “more pushy” in asking his bosses about the priests they were moving around so often.
He said he should have chased up a complaint of suspected abuse he passed on to a Christian Brothers school in Ballarat, and he was wrong to have agreed to Little’s decision to let one paedophile priest resign on the excuse of ill-health.
That last deceit was shabby, and Pell’s claims that he was not concerned with protecting church assets from victims rang tinny.
Yet here I still go again, again protecting Pell — in part — from the mob.