Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (23 of them)
For those who need annotation: Pell spent 41 years actively covering up for repeated child rapists with victims as young as four years old - including relocating them to multiple new hunting grounds other parishes, bribing and threatening the victims and their parents to stay silent, and eventually (once ascending to archbishop, a position he held in the country's two largest cities across a sixteen-year span) establishing and rigging internal and external enquiries into five decades of child rape to avoid prosecutions.
For no particular reason, $8 million in payouts were made to accusers during his tenure as archbishop in the second of these two cities. In one single case, the church spent 15 times more in lawyers' fees than the victim sought. A royal commission determined that this expenditure was intended primarly to deter other targets from bringing claims. Pell also publicly stated at this time, upon questioning, that abortion is "a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people."
He was then rewarded for his service by being appointed to the Vatican, with a newly-created role in order to transfer him from local jurisdiction.
Eight years after the first legal inquiries into Pell's own multiple, three-decade-spanning, child rapes and molestations, and four years before transferring him to Vatican City, the Vatican began a regular process of claiming that he was too unwell to return to face questioning. (NB: he repeatedly flew to other countries on church business for at least five years during this time.) Nine years after that, after finally agreeing that investigators could fly to him, he was convicted and spent one year in solitary, before the conviction was revoked on technicality, with the judge observing the the accusers' testimony had been factual.
During the trial, Pell's defense lawyer had argued for a lower sentence on the grounds that one specific rape in the case was “plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating.” (Multiple of his accusers had committed suicide during the trial and its lead-up, and were not testifying.)
tbf Rod is surely correct, prima facie, that he was a "great man of the Catholic Church."
― more crankable (sic), Saturday, 14 January 2023 05:06 (one year ago) link
one month passes...
one month passes...
four months pass...
three weeks pass...
Was 9/11 a metaphysical event?
On 9/11/2002, I went to Ground Zero with a friend and neighbor, for the one-year memorial. Very strange and powerful wind arose at just the time when the first plane hit, and didn’t end until every name had been read at the site of the mass death. When my friend made it back to her apartment, she saw something that shocked and shook her, and rang me to come over at once. When I got there, she showed me hanging on her wall a Revolutionary War-era American flag, a small one, about the size of a sheet of paper, under a sealed frame. It was split from top to bottom. I asked her what the significance of this was.She said she had had this flag for many years, after receiving it as a gift. It has hung on the wall of her home office in the many places she has lived since receiving it. This afternoon, having returned from Ground Zero, she noticed that it had torn. The frame was still sealed. Nobody had been in her apartment. She was visibly shocked.
We were both Christians. We knew the meaning of the tearing of the veil, in Biblical symbolism. I don’t know about her — and I lost contact with her many years ago, and wouldn’t know how to reach her if I wanted to — but I was filled with fear that it was a sign that America had lost God’s favor, and had fallen under judgment. But I banished that thought. We were preparing for war on Iraq, and I could not allow myself to think that it was going to end badly for us.
― mookieproof, Friday, 15 September 2023 00:20 (seven months ago) link
six months pass...