Cardinal George Pell isn’t the sort of man to say ‘so there is a God after all!’ – but plenty of his long-time supporters must be thinking exactly that right now.
It was always baffling that until earlier this year Pell seemed certain to die in an Australian jail on the basis of obviously fabricated sex abuse charges. How could a second jury – the first was split– find him unanimously guilty of abusing a teenage altar server in a busy cathedral right after Sunday Mass when he didn’t have either time or the opportunity to commit such a gross act? And on the basis of the testimony of one accuser, his supposed victim? (Another boy had also claimed to have been abused, but confessed that it was a lie before his tragically early death.)
Some of us suspected that the cardinal’s enemies in the Vatican had conspired with fanatically anti-Pell police in the state of Victoria to assemble the risible case against him.
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