Cardinal Pell & The Mafia
Rob Dreher
I hear great news out of Australia, where Cardinal George Pell’s appeal on his child abuse conviction was heard by a court tribunal today. Daily Telegraph journalist Miranda Devine writes that the government’s cast collapsed. Her column is behind a paywall, but here is an excerpt:
"Cardinal George Pell and his supporters were relieved that his appeal of his child sexual assault conviction was live-streamed on Wednesday.
"Cardinal George Pell and his supporters were relieved that his appeal of his child sexual assault conviction was live-streamed on Wednesday.
"The intense seven-hour courtroom argument was the first time the public has heard first-hand the flimsiness of the evidence against him.
"Three judges of the Victorian Appeals Court are reviewing the jury’s verdict in which Cardinal Pell was convicted of sexually assaulting two choir boys after Sunday Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in December 1996. One of the boys has since died and told his mother he never was molested.
"So that leaves the conviction to be based on the word of one man against Cardinal Pell’s, with no corroborating evidence, no forensic evidence, no witnesses, and against a mountain of contrary evidence which showed that the allegations were highly improbable, if not impossible.
"The jury verdict has troubled legal experts and lay people around the world ever since. The evidence seen so far leads to the conclusion that an innocent man was jailed to atone for the sins of others in a church plagued by sexual abuse scandals."
From what I’m told, the state’s case was routed, though we won’t know the verdict for months. Meanwhile, Cardinal Pell remains jailed in Melbourne.
In 2014, Pell was given by Pope Francis responsibility for cleaning up the infamously corrupt Vatican Bank. When that news broke, I thought, “They’ll find some way to take him out. They won’t let him do it.” When the child abuse charges were brought against Pell in 2017, I thought, “So that’s how they did it.” But I didn’t go further, because how would I prove that Pell was set up? It was just a hunch.
When I was in Australia last month, I found myself in a conversation one evening with someone about all this. (I had a lot of Pell conversations, as you might imagine.) I shared with my interlocutor my suspicion that Pell was set up to take him off the Vatican Bank case. The man across the table said, “That’s interesting. You may not know it, but the ‘Ndrangheta is quite well established in Australia, especially in Victoria. That’s where the cardinal was charged.”
The ‘Ndrangheta is the Calabrian mafia, and yes, they are well established in Australia. They control organized crime on Australia’s East Coast, and are said to have infiltrated every part of the Australian establishment. With that in mind, here’s an interesting bit of news, from the Irish Times, Nov. 16, 2013:
Senior Calabrian Mafia investigator Nicola Gratteri, whose investigative zeal has forced him to live with police protection since 1989, has said the pope’s plans to reform Vatican structures, including the Vatican bank, the IOR, could prove a problem for the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s most powerful Mafia.
He said that while Pope John Paul II called on the “military” mafiosi to “repent” in 1993, Pope Francis has gone further, perhaps hitting the ’Ndrangheta where it hurts.
“He has named his G8 [council of cardinals] to overhaul the entire structure of the Vatican, including a review of the Vatican’s economic affairs and in particular, the IOR,” Gratteri says.
“For those with real economic power it is obvious this could be a huge disadvantage . . . Given that in the past we’ve had collusion at the highest level between church and Mafia, this exposes the pope.”
Months after this report, Cardinal George Pell was named by Francis to reform the IOR. In 2014, Pell said his team found nearly two billion euros hidden away in various Vatican accounts, off the balance sheets. In November 2015, with the Pope’s approval, Pell issued new guidelines for running all Vatican offices, to bring them up to international standards for financial transparency.
In April 2016, without consulting Pell, the Vatican Secretary of State suspends an external audit of Vatican finances. The National Catholic Register quotes an unnamed source as saying that officials are afraid of what the audit will find, and want to get rid of Pell. A year later, Pell was charged in Melbourne with sexual abuse. And that was the end of the Pell threat to the Vatican Bank insiders.
This mafia thing, it could all be a coincidence, and in any case, there are other factors in play in the persecution of George Pell, who was widely hated by Australian anti-clericalists. But it’s curious all the same. George Pell was the No. 1 enemy of the ‘Ndrangheta in the Vatican, and he showed early on in his tenure, when he uncovered all the hidden euros, that he meant business. Now George Pell sits in solitary confinement in a prison cell in Melbourne, convicted on pathetically shabby charges. The old guard in the Vatican won. The world is as it always was.
UPDATE: I have been told by someone very much in a position to know that the current head of the Vatican Bank is from Calabria. For what it’s worth…
Cardinal Pell’s Christmas in Prison
National Catholic Register
Edward Pentin
December 19, 2019
Sources tell the Register that the cardinal, whose appeal of his conviction for sexual abuse is now being considered by Australia’s High Court, is enduring difficult conditions in solitary confinement.
VATICAN CITY — Cardinal George Pell may be allowed to receive Holy Communion in his prison cell on Christmas Day but he will still not be permitted to celebrate Mass, sources close to the cardinal have told the Register this week.
Since the cardinal was jailed and placed in solitary confinement in February, the Melbourne Assessment Prison where he is imprisoned has forbidden the former prefect for the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy from celebrating Mass.
It remains unclear if he has been able to regularly receive Holy Communion, although one source said he has been able to do so, “but not necessarily on Sundays.” The cardinal remains “a very much hated figure here which is why it’s out of the question for him to celebrate Mass,” the source said.
The cardinal is reportedly allowed one official visitor per week and a source close to the cardinal who prefers not to be named told the Register he is receiving “great support” from a religious sister, while another source, a friend of the cardinal, said “his cell is tiny and he is only allowed five books.”
The friend, who said the cardinal has been receiving thousands of letters and Christmas cards of support which he tries to reply to, told the Register that some supporters hope to go caroling outside his cell on Christmas Eve.
Cardinal Pell is serving a six-year jail sentence after being convicted last December on five charges of sexually abusing two choir boys as archbishop of Melbourne after Sunday Mass in the city’s St. Patrick’s cathedral in 1996 and 1997.
The second alleged victim died of a heroin overdose in 2014, and had denied on several occasions that Cardinal Pell had abused him. The surviving complainant, whose uncorroborated testimony was solely relied on by the jury that convicted the cardinal, has yet to be publicly identified but, according to a number of sources who have followed the case closely, is believed to have also suffered from drug addiction.
The Australian court forbade Cardinal Pell’s defense team from being able to question the credibility of the complainant who, according to appeal judge Mark Weinberg, changed his story “multiple times.”
The cardinal has always vigorously protested his innocence and last month two High Court judges referred the cardinal’s application for special leave to appeal to a full bench of the High Court’s justices.
The cardinal’s lawyers had successfully argued that a lower appellate court had made mistakes in its decision in August to uphold his conviction — a decision not supported by dissenting judge Weinberg. The High Court hearing is expected to take place in March or April next year.
Growing Doubts
Meanwhile, a chorus of public opinion that seriously doubts Cardinal Pell’s conviction appears to be growing. Journalist Keith Windschuttle has carried out research showing it was impossible given the complainant’s timeline, while further evidence has emerged in support of the cardinal, including two women who worked at the cathedral and told CNA last month that they believed the allegations were “impossible.” Neither was invited to give evidence at the trials.
Others, too, have been coming to the cardinal’s defense.
“I’m not a Catholic. I abhor paedophilia. I’m not particularly enamoured of George Pell,” wrote a pseudonymous commentator Lushington Brady in The BFD, a leading New Zealand newspaper, on Dec. 13. “Yet, I can’t escape the uneasy feeling that the most egregious miscarriage of justice in Australia since the Chamberlains has been perpetrated in Pell’s case.”
Brady, who was referring to the case of Lindy Chamberlain, a New Zealand-born mother wrongfully jailed in Australia in 1980 for the murder of her baby, added that “legal experts on all sides are openly aghast at what they see as a blatant travesty of justice.”
Retired non-Catholic barrister Anthony Charles Smith wrote Nov. 16 that he was “very troubled” by the case whose lack of evidence “curdles my stomach.” He added that the allegations against the cardinal would have been given “short shrift by competent, experienced crown prosecutors” in the 1980s and 1990s.
And like former Labor minister Peter Baldwin, Smith compared the case with Carl Beech who was recently jailed for eight years for making uncorroborated accusations against prominent British figures, but not before reputations had been ruined.
Smith said that given the circumstances, Cardinal Pell “had little prospect of getting a fair trial before a jury,” and he added he had “never seen a clearer illustration of pre-judgment than was there demonstrated.”
Mob Mentality?
These critical voices follow Greg Barns, a left-wing activist-lawyer, who wrote back in March that the Cardinal Pell case was characterized by “frightening ignorance” of Australia’s legal system, “triumphalism” on the part of some media who have pursued Cardinal Pell for years, and a “lynch mob” clamoring for the “cardinal’s blood,” which Barns called “truly frightening.”
Such a mob mentality was visible again earlier this month when former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was vilified by the premier of Victoria state, Daniel Andrew, for visiting the cardinal in jail. “Shameful, absolutely shameful,” said Andrews, a Catholic, adding that Abbott should apologize. News of the visit was leaked to the press by one of the prison guards.
The growing perception of injustice led one of the cardinal’s friends to comment: “Is it possible to now start crying out from the housetops, ‘Free Cardinal Pell!’?”
Questions about a prejudicial justice system in Victoria connected to internal corruption are now emerging that may help to answer a few imponderables about how the cardinal could have been jailed on a paucity of evidence.
An email exchange published last week shows that in 2014 members of the Victoria’s police department sought to use accusations against Cardinal Pell to distract from a scandal affecting the department.
The scandal involved criminal defense lawyer Nicola Gobbo who was recruited by Victoria police to be an informant against members of the Ndrangheta Calabrian crime syndicate whom she was representing.
Connections between the mafia in Italy and Australia have a relatively long history dating back to the 1950s and continue today.
Free Cardinal Pell!
Make Mr. McCarrick talk!
"Three judges of the Victorian Appeals Court are reviewing the jury’s verdict in which Cardinal Pell was convicted of sexually assaulting two choir boys after Sunday Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in December 1996. One of the boys has since died and told his mother he never was molested.
"So that leaves the conviction to be based on the word of one man against Cardinal Pell’s, with no corroborating evidence, no forensic evidence, no witnesses, and against a mountain of contrary evidence which showed that the allegations were highly improbable, if not impossible.
"The jury verdict has troubled legal experts and lay people around the world ever since. The evidence seen so far leads to the conclusion that an innocent man was jailed to atone for the sins of others in a church plagued by sexual abuse scandals."
From what I’m told, the state’s case was routed, though we won’t know the verdict for months. Meanwhile, Cardinal Pell remains jailed in Melbourne.
In 2014, Pell was given by Pope Francis responsibility for cleaning up the infamously corrupt Vatican Bank. When that news broke, I thought, “They’ll find some way to take him out. They won’t let him do it.” When the child abuse charges were brought against Pell in 2017, I thought, “So that’s how they did it.” But I didn’t go further, because how would I prove that Pell was set up? It was just a hunch.
When I was in Australia last month, I found myself in a conversation one evening with someone about all this. (I had a lot of Pell conversations, as you might imagine.) I shared with my interlocutor my suspicion that Pell was set up to take him off the Vatican Bank case. The man across the table said, “That’s interesting. You may not know it, but the ‘Ndrangheta is quite well established in Australia, especially in Victoria. That’s where the cardinal was charged.”
The ‘Ndrangheta is the Calabrian mafia, and yes, they are well established in Australia. They control organized crime on Australia’s East Coast, and are said to have infiltrated every part of the Australian establishment. With that in mind, here’s an interesting bit of news, from the Irish Times, Nov. 16, 2013:
Senior Calabrian Mafia investigator Nicola Gratteri, whose investigative zeal has forced him to live with police protection since 1989, has said the pope’s plans to reform Vatican structures, including the Vatican bank, the IOR, could prove a problem for the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s most powerful Mafia.
He said that while Pope John Paul II called on the “military” mafiosi to “repent” in 1993, Pope Francis has gone further, perhaps hitting the ’Ndrangheta where it hurts.
“He has named his G8 [council of cardinals] to overhaul the entire structure of the Vatican, including a review of the Vatican’s economic affairs and in particular, the IOR,” Gratteri says.
“For those with real economic power it is obvious this could be a huge disadvantage . . . Given that in the past we’ve had collusion at the highest level between church and Mafia, this exposes the pope.”
Months after this report, Cardinal George Pell was named by Francis to reform the IOR. In 2014, Pell said his team found nearly two billion euros hidden away in various Vatican accounts, off the balance sheets. In November 2015, with the Pope’s approval, Pell issued new guidelines for running all Vatican offices, to bring them up to international standards for financial transparency.
In April 2016, without consulting Pell, the Vatican Secretary of State suspends an external audit of Vatican finances. The National Catholic Register quotes an unnamed source as saying that officials are afraid of what the audit will find, and want to get rid of Pell. A year later, Pell was charged in Melbourne with sexual abuse. And that was the end of the Pell threat to the Vatican Bank insiders.
This mafia thing, it could all be a coincidence, and in any case, there are other factors in play in the persecution of George Pell, who was widely hated by Australian anti-clericalists. But it’s curious all the same. George Pell was the No. 1 enemy of the ‘Ndrangheta in the Vatican, and he showed early on in his tenure, when he uncovered all the hidden euros, that he meant business. Now George Pell sits in solitary confinement in a prison cell in Melbourne, convicted on pathetically shabby charges. The old guard in the Vatican won. The world is as it always was.
UPDATE: I have been told by someone very much in a position to know that the current head of the Vatican Bank is from Calabria. For what it’s worth…
Cardinal Pell’s Christmas in Prison
National Catholic Register
Edward Pentin
December 19, 2019
Sources tell the Register that the cardinal, whose appeal of his conviction for sexual abuse is now being considered by Australia’s High Court, is enduring difficult conditions in solitary confinement.
VATICAN CITY — Cardinal George Pell may be allowed to receive Holy Communion in his prison cell on Christmas Day but he will still not be permitted to celebrate Mass, sources close to the cardinal have told the Register this week.
Since the cardinal was jailed and placed in solitary confinement in February, the Melbourne Assessment Prison where he is imprisoned has forbidden the former prefect for the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy from celebrating Mass.
It remains unclear if he has been able to regularly receive Holy Communion, although one source said he has been able to do so, “but not necessarily on Sundays.” The cardinal remains “a very much hated figure here which is why it’s out of the question for him to celebrate Mass,” the source said.
The cardinal is reportedly allowed one official visitor per week and a source close to the cardinal who prefers not to be named told the Register he is receiving “great support” from a religious sister, while another source, a friend of the cardinal, said “his cell is tiny and he is only allowed five books.”
The friend, who said the cardinal has been receiving thousands of letters and Christmas cards of support which he tries to reply to, told the Register that some supporters hope to go caroling outside his cell on Christmas Eve.
Cardinal Pell is serving a six-year jail sentence after being convicted last December on five charges of sexually abusing two choir boys as archbishop of Melbourne after Sunday Mass in the city’s St. Patrick’s cathedral in 1996 and 1997.
The second alleged victim died of a heroin overdose in 2014, and had denied on several occasions that Cardinal Pell had abused him. The surviving complainant, whose uncorroborated testimony was solely relied on by the jury that convicted the cardinal, has yet to be publicly identified but, according to a number of sources who have followed the case closely, is believed to have also suffered from drug addiction.
The Australian court forbade Cardinal Pell’s defense team from being able to question the credibility of the complainant who, according to appeal judge Mark Weinberg, changed his story “multiple times.”
The cardinal has always vigorously protested his innocence and last month two High Court judges referred the cardinal’s application for special leave to appeal to a full bench of the High Court’s justices.
The cardinal’s lawyers had successfully argued that a lower appellate court had made mistakes in its decision in August to uphold his conviction — a decision not supported by dissenting judge Weinberg. The High Court hearing is expected to take place in March or April next year.
Growing Doubts
Meanwhile, a chorus of public opinion that seriously doubts Cardinal Pell’s conviction appears to be growing. Journalist Keith Windschuttle has carried out research showing it was impossible given the complainant’s timeline, while further evidence has emerged in support of the cardinal, including two women who worked at the cathedral and told CNA last month that they believed the allegations were “impossible.” Neither was invited to give evidence at the trials.
Others, too, have been coming to the cardinal’s defense.
“I’m not a Catholic. I abhor paedophilia. I’m not particularly enamoured of George Pell,” wrote a pseudonymous commentator Lushington Brady in The BFD, a leading New Zealand newspaper, on Dec. 13. “Yet, I can’t escape the uneasy feeling that the most egregious miscarriage of justice in Australia since the Chamberlains has been perpetrated in Pell’s case.”
Brady, who was referring to the case of Lindy Chamberlain, a New Zealand-born mother wrongfully jailed in Australia in 1980 for the murder of her baby, added that “legal experts on all sides are openly aghast at what they see as a blatant travesty of justice.”
Retired non-Catholic barrister Anthony Charles Smith wrote Nov. 16 that he was “very troubled” by the case whose lack of evidence “curdles my stomach.” He added that the allegations against the cardinal would have been given “short shrift by competent, experienced crown prosecutors” in the 1980s and 1990s.
And like former Labor minister Peter Baldwin, Smith compared the case with Carl Beech who was recently jailed for eight years for making uncorroborated accusations against prominent British figures, but not before reputations had been ruined.
Smith said that given the circumstances, Cardinal Pell “had little prospect of getting a fair trial before a jury,” and he added he had “never seen a clearer illustration of pre-judgment than was there demonstrated.”
Mob Mentality?
These critical voices follow Greg Barns, a left-wing activist-lawyer, who wrote back in March that the Cardinal Pell case was characterized by “frightening ignorance” of Australia’s legal system, “triumphalism” on the part of some media who have pursued Cardinal Pell for years, and a “lynch mob” clamoring for the “cardinal’s blood,” which Barns called “truly frightening.”
Such a mob mentality was visible again earlier this month when former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was vilified by the premier of Victoria state, Daniel Andrew, for visiting the cardinal in jail. “Shameful, absolutely shameful,” said Andrews, a Catholic, adding that Abbott should apologize. News of the visit was leaked to the press by one of the prison guards.
The growing perception of injustice led one of the cardinal’s friends to comment: “Is it possible to now start crying out from the housetops, ‘Free Cardinal Pell!’?”
Questions about a prejudicial justice system in Victoria connected to internal corruption are now emerging that may help to answer a few imponderables about how the cardinal could have been jailed on a paucity of evidence.
An email exchange published last week shows that in 2014 members of the Victoria’s police department sought to use accusations against Cardinal Pell to distract from a scandal affecting the department.
The scandal involved criminal defense lawyer Nicola Gobbo who was recruited by Victoria police to be an informant against members of the Ndrangheta Calabrian crime syndicate whom she was representing.
Connections between the mafia in Italy and Australia have a relatively long history dating back to the 1950s and continue today.
Free Cardinal Pell!
Make Mr. McCarrick talk!