I am sure if Pell is found guilty by a jury of his peers, you’ll drop out of the conversation or explain that because he’s appealing, he still might not be guilty.
“Well, we haven’t yet proven in a court opf law THIS one priest is a rapist just yet” is hilarious. The Roman Catholic Church has been crawling with pedophile rapists for decades; you’d be crazy to leave a child alone with a priest. Step back from the tree and look at the forest.
I understand you’re emotionally invested in your faith, but it’s the constant lawyering and stonewalling that has allowed this problem to fester for decades, as a result of which thousands more children were raped.
Why are you and other Catholics so passionate about dodging the truth about your Church being a nest of child abusers?
The most depressing thing about this is when you’re wrong, you won’t acknowledge it. I do.
Now, you’re right about part of your supposition. If he appeals, and an appellate court reverses the conviction, then he has not been found guilty by a jury pf his peers in a fair trial – the whole point of the appellate process is to correct for errors that happen at trial.
But if he exhausts his appeals – that is, if there is a final judgement of criminal guilt – I won’t dodge the issue in the slightest. I am be here in this thread, forthrightly and repeatedly admitting I was in error.
I’ll say the charges against him were not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, since of course, that is, in fact, what will have happened. It will remain the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is a nest of child rapists, even if one particular one, like Pell, cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have committed a specific crime.
But then, I have made no specific claims about Pell to be in error of; I will have no reason to say “I was wrong,” because I have never said Pell is certainly guilty of these rather recent charges, and that the evidence against him is so ironclad that he has no chance of acquittal. I think it’s at least fairly likely Pell is a rapist, and I think it’s very likely Pell has at least obstructed justice with regards to a number of child rapes - but “likely” is not nearly enough to send a person to prison for in a civilized country. Were I on the jury and I was 90% sure he was guilty I’d vote “not guilty” because that’s how it works in a decent country with proper laws.
This raises a fascinating question; if Pell actually does go back to the Land of Poisonous Creatures, is tried, and is found guilty, what error will you admit to having made? Is it currently your position that you are sure Pell is innocent of the charges against him? That is a truly amazing position to take, if that’s what you’re saying your error would be. Have you examined the evidence?
It’s my position that there is insufficient evidence against him as a matter of law to convict him, and I am convinced that the charges are being brought because he’s a Catholic cardinal. I also think that accusing someone 40 years after the offense was committed makes a defense very difficult.
Would it not make the prosecution rather difficult as well?
Also, what evidence is there that Roman Catholic Cardinals are more prone to being charged with rape than, say, people in any other profession? It seems to actually be a fairly unusual occurrence. Indeed, I am struggling to find ANY other examples - if there have been any they rank behind people who play for sports teams named “Cardinals” in Google searches.
I meant, of course, Roman Catholic cardinals named “George.”
:rolleyes:
Or maybe I meant Catholic clergy. You decide. It’s fun to watch you pick the most absurd thing you can think of and pretend you thought that’s what I meant.
It’s amazing how he doesn’t get that Pell (and Bernard Law, still being hidden in the Vatican) have been *protected *because they’re Catholic clergy, not *targeted *because of it. But, if you’ve been indoctrinated since childhood that the organization is the instrument of God on Earth and can do no wrong, well, that’s where it leads.
What would this argument be based on? What polls are you talking about, and what do you know of how they adjust (or fail to) for such things when weighting the responses?
Admittedly, I fully expect that in upcoming years, we’re liable to get an undercount of the Hispanic population on account of the recently stepped-up ICE tactics. (If they’ll nab you in court when you’re testifying against an abusive spouse, why wouldn’t they use your responses to the American Community Survey against you?) But that shouldn’t affect estimates based on polling already done; the current population controls that surveys weight up to should still be good.
I do not think it is supported by an honest review of the facts, though. If anything, ElvisL1ves is right; Catholic clergy have used their prestige and position to AVOID being arrested. Quite effectively, too.
Of course, it is quite difficult to say for sure, because the grim facts are that people who rape children usually get away with it without ever being charged (Jimmy Savile, anyone?) so we have a dearth of facts.
In the case of Catholic clergy, though, we have an organization that not only has a truly remarkable number of its members who rape children, but which as an organization has engaged in a series of remarkably broad, long lasting conspiracies to cover up mass rape, which the conspiracy going at least as high as the level of Cardinal, and there is dreadful evidence that rapists might well have been deliberately moved from place to place to find new victims. We see this happening not in a few places but almost everywhere there are priests and that people have the courage to look. We also know the Roman Catholic Church, from the Pope down, has, for the most part, attempted to keep civil authorities in the dark.
Have there been mass arrests of the rapists? Well, no. In the great majority of cases, no charges are laid; it is quite unusual for a Catholic clergyman to be charged with crimes related to sexual abuse, relative to the staggering number of scandals. Even in Ireland, where the Church has after a long, long time) at least admitted the stunning breadth of the horror - hundreds of priests raping thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of children - only one priest, that I can find, was ever convicted of a crime. In dioceses where there were scores, hundreds of cases of priests sodomizing children, the Church successfully avoided anyone being prosecuted.
And now there’s a backlash. All those guys escaped prosecution, so let’s get Pell. Even if the evidence is weak, he’s a priest, so he’s probably guilty.
It is quite clear that if a jury fails to convict Cardinal George that he must be as pure a driven snow, and was only targeted because he was Catholic, just like OJ Simpson was innocent but unfairly targeted for being a sports star, and Roy Bryant was innocent but unfairly targeted for being white.
He doesn’t even know what the evidence is. Besides, he’s implying a level of familiarity with Australian law that is very likely unwarranted for a Salvadoran-American.
But the accused is one of The Leaders, and must therefore the target of unfair persecution regardless of any pesky facts or morality. Sad!
I can’t stand Pell - I think he’s an apparatchik in serious need of an empathy transplant, and a terrible representative of his church - but TBH I find the timing of the child abuse charges pretty suspicious too, coming as they do after he’s already exposed himself as a general hard-hearted bastard who cares more about keeping up his church’s status than about abused kids. Being a soulless bureaucrat who throws his parishioners under the bus is a pretty bad thing but it’s a *different *bad thing than actually being a paedophile himself.
Out of the three possibilities - 1)he really was an abuser and it’s taken someone this long to screw their courage up to expose him; 2)he’s been in the news for so long being a general hard-hearted bastard that someone’s conflated their fuzzy memories of someone abusing them with their present-day loathing of his complacent face; 3)someone snapped through frustration with his ducking and weaving about coming back to Aus to talk about why the church protected abusers for so long (‘yeah? well dodge THIS’) - I’m not currently seeing possibility 1 as the front-runner.
I guess though none of us know when the accusations of sexual assault were actually made. And of course it takes some goodly amount of time from when accusations are levelled and when charges are laid. Who is to know when Pell first came under police scrutiny…last year, or five years ago?