Catholic Church condemns George Pell case online slurs

The Catholic Church has condemned a fake email campaign attacking the key witness in George Pell’s criminal case.

Cardinal George Pell. Picture: AP

The Catholic Church has condemned a fake email campaign using the coronavirus pandemic as a platform to attack the key witness in George Pell’s criminal case and undermine the cardinal.

The church has denounced the campaign, which makes bizarre claims about Cardinal Pell’s convictions, the role of his key accuser and the proliferation of the corona­virus. The defamatory emails have been sent around the country, claiming to be from Catholic parishes, dioceses and other ­organisations. The church believes the campaign amounts to criminal behaviour.

Information technology ­experts say those responsible are creating fake email addresses using legitimate or seemingly legitimate domain names.

The seeming authenticity of some of the emails has sparked concerns from the church, suggesting coronavirus rates in Victoria could somehow be linked to the justice system’s failures in the prosecution process.

Cardinal Pell’s convictions were overturned in the High Court, 7-0, after he was wrongly incarcerated for more than a year for abusing two choirboys.

The convictions came after the Victorian Court of Appeal ruled 2-1 to back the decision of the County Court’s second jury to convict Cardinal Pell.

“The content in the small number of emails that have been ­forwarded to us is offensive, un-Christian and, in some cases, defamatory,” said Stephen Hackett, general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

“The views expressed in the emails we have seen do not in any way reflect the views of the Catholic Church, nor the organisations that are purported to have sent them. It is deeply regrettable that a number of people are being ­maligned in these emails, which seem designed to attack Cardinal Pell, Witness J, the Catholic Church and now even politicians.”

He said IT experts had determined the online attacks were based on fake email addresses.

“This has been described as the equivalent of someone sending a letter in the post that is ‘signed’ in someone else’s name and contains a fake return address,” Father Hackett said. “Just as a letter of that kind would be hard to spot as fraudulent, some of the email addresses used appear to be legitimate.”

Cardinal Pell was released from jail earlier this year, in a vindication of his supporters’ claim that he had been wronged.

The final royal commission report into institutional sex abuse found Cardinal Pell had offered “implausible” evidence on the criminal behaviour of two pedophile priests. The unredacted royal commission chapters relating to Cardinal Pell chronicled what was found to be a series of missteps by him dating back to the 1970s, rejecting key evidence in relation to two offending priests. The reports found Cardinal Pell was aware that one of the world’s worst Catholic offenders — Gerald Ridsdale — was shifted to Sydney from western Victoria in 1982 because of his violent abuse of children.

The commission argued it was “implausible’’ Cardinal Pell, 78, did not know Ridsdale was being moved because of his offending.

The commission also favoured the evidence of the Victorian Catholic Education Office over the cardinal on the actions of disgraced Melbourne priest Peter Searson and whether Cardinal Pell was kept in the dark about some of Searson’s offending.

Cardinal Pell’s supporters have questioned the accuracy of the royal commission report.