Quote:Chrissie Foster calls for George Pell's Melbourne Response to be 'torn down'

Updated 26 Feb 2019

The mother of two girls abused by a Catholic priest says the conviction of George Pell on child sex abuse charges should lead to the tearing down of the controversial compensation scheme he set up for survivors of clerical sexual abuse.
Key points:

   Pell is Australia's most senior Catholic cleric and has been convicted of child sex abuse
   Chrissie Foster said the verdict helped her understand Pell's "angry" response to her family
   She is calling for the Melbourne Response established by Pell to be dismantled

Pell was last year found guilty of sexually abusing two choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral during his time as archbishop of Melbourne in December 1996, but the verdict had been suppressed until now.

Chrissie Foster's daughters Emma and Katie were raped by Melbourne priest Kevin O'Donnell while they were at primary school in the 1980s.

Emma suffered from eating disorders, drug addiction and self harm and in 2008 she overdosed on medication and died, aged 26.

Katie became a binge drinker as she reached adulthood and was hit by a drunk driver in 1999. She was left physically and mentally disabled, requiring 24-hour care.

Ms Foster said Pell's guilty verdict helped her understand why Pell had been "so angry" when she and her husband Anthony asked him for help in the late 1990s.

'Angry' Pell told parents to prove allegations in court

Ms Foster said they had approached the then-archbishop in 1997 after O'Donnell had already pleaded guilty to committing child sexual abuse against other children.

The child sex abuse royal commission heard that the Catholic Church had been aware of allegations of O'Donnell's abuse as early as 1958.

"He was a paedophile, he pleaded guilty to 31 years of offending. He was currently in prison, pleaded guilty. What could [Pell] argue about it?"

Ms Foster claimed Pell became agitated and told the parents they had better be sure they could substantiate their allegations against O'Donnell in court.

"What proof is there? My five-year-old did not take a video camera with her when O'Donnell took her to there and video it to say 'ah, here's the proof'," she said.

She said the news of Pell's conviction for child sex offences committed in 1996 had shed new light on the interaction.

"Now I look at it and I think, my goodness, this is why he was trying to shut us down then."
'Someone right at the top, committing these offences'

During his time as archbishop, Pell was one of the architects of the church's controversial Melbourne Response, which was set up to compensate victims of clergy abuse.

A 2015 report into the scheme recommended it be operated and administered independently of Melbourne archbishop's office.

How one man's testimony brought down George Pell, a giant in the Catholic Church, and Australia's most senior cleric.

Ms Foster said that scheme, which initially capped payments to abuse survivors at $50,000, should be closed in the wake of Pell's conviction.

   "I think everything that he has said on this issue and everything he has put in place on this issue, should be torn down."

Ms Foster sat through a number of days of court hearings in the Pell case, and said "it was amazing" when the guilty verdict was handed down.

"This is actually someone right at the top, committing these offences," she said.

"And maybe there's a lot of scared clergy out there, which would be good, because this should be hunted down and punished through the courts, because it should've happened a long time ago.

Cardinal George Pell was found guilty of child sex offences last year, in a courtroom full of journalists. So why is the verdict only being made public now?

"We've got a bit of catching up to do."

Former chief executive of the Catholic Church's Truth, Justice and Healing Council Francis Sullivan said he was shocked by the conviction.

The council was responsible for coordinating the Catholic Church's official response to the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, including detailing the Melbourne Response.

Asked whether he had been lied to regarding Pell's sincerity in wanting to help victims through the scheme, he said: "I don't know. It's a tough day."

"I'm just pretty upset. It's a big shock. It is a really big shock," he said.

   "It's really hard for a lot of Catholics, people who obviously know Cardinal Pell well will be devastated and shocked.

"As a Catholic myself, I think God, has it come to this?

"When you have a Cardinal being convicted, it's more than a person being convicted in a way, it's like our whole approach to life has been put through the wringer."

When police first put abuse claims to him in a conference room at a Rome airport, George Pell described the allegations as "absolute and disgraceful rubbish".

Mr Sullivan said the institution of the church — separate to the church community — had been "brought to its knees" by the issue.

"It has lost its credibility, frankly, it is still struggling to come to terms with that," he said.

"In lots of ways it still uses inertia to manage these issues away. There's an arrogance that's still there about this, in the institutional player, and until they realise the community has turned their back on them then that institution is doomed."

In a statement, the president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, said bishops were "shocked" by the guilty verdict.

He said the bishops respected the legal system and hoped justice would be served, and had committed themselves anew to making the church a safe place for all, "especially the young and vulnerable".

Melburnians reacted with a mix of emotions following the revelation of the guilty verdict, with local ABC radio inundated with messages and calls on Tuesday morning.

George in Melbourne said he was a victim of abuse and was nearly in tears when he heard the news while driving into the city.

"All my life I've been told I was a liar. I did something wrong. It was my fault from these people in power," he said.

   "Today, someone has actually come around — the judge [and] the jury — and said, 'We believe you. We believe what happened. We believe you'.

"I actually cheered when I heard that he had been convicted. But at the same time there's a lot of sadness that has gone on for so long and it's damaged so many people's lives."

Others called for the church to be destroyed and for the police to seize all church documents.

The Richmond Football Club announced they would be removing Pell as a vice patron of the club.

"While acknowledging his right to appeal, the club has formed a view that his association is no longer tenable or appropriate," it said in a statement."

(04-17-2019, 12:49 AM)Relaxo Wrote: the sorrow felt by countless people abused by clergy of the Catholic church is far more heart wrenching

Quote:Inspired by an essay by Catherine Ingram (linked within).

"The cathedral will be rebuilt, with gusto and relief, because we cannot rebuild the Larsen Ice Shelf, nor replant the Amazon. Rebuilding will return us to the productivity we know, displacing an anxiety we cannot confess to any priest."

http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/our-lady-of-the-extinction%ef%bb%bf/

Our Lady of the Extinction


A few have already started to murmur it.

Quietly, because it feels sacrilegious, or too soon. And of course there was beauty, identity, and deep attachment. There was a gilded crown of thorns.

Yet everything moves so quickly. Both fire, and the vow to rebuild the past.

The vow is not to rebuild the deep past of primeval forests or oral culture. Nor to rebuild the Museo Nacional in Rio, nor sacred indigenous sites the world over. But to rebuild what it has meant to be European, French, and Christian. Or the dream of such things, circa the industrial age.

Because there is no other time to speak the truth about having no time, some voices are saying:

We all live in a burning cathedral, together. It’s much older than 800 years. Can we see the flare in Paris as a microcosm?

Watch the spire collapse. You can feel its internal strength turning to cinders. For a moment, the fire itself seems to offer support. There’s a pause. Perhaps prayers are also keeping it aloft. Then it leans, and you know it is falling into ash.

It’s just like watching the Ilulissat Glacier calve. The same quivering pause, before mass movement that starts with imperceptible splintering. But the scale is vast. They said it was like watching Manhattan fall into the sea, all at once.

When the ice falls, the water rises. The charred spire flattens into the pavement at a new ground zero. Waves of sorrow and hubris rise in displacement.

Notre Dame’s roof was a tinderbox of 13,000 trees, extracted from ancient forests. Hewn and raised with extracted labour into an alternative canopy, something better than the sky. To house relics, to validate relics, to hoard wealth, to symbolize material and spiritual empire, to tighten the tension between mystery and certainty, to inspire awe and fervor, to enshrine the names of powerful men, to worship the family unit from which all hymns flow and which all of this industry exploits, to freeze female bodies into statues of objectified melancholy.

It’s what male desire and power do. It’s what those of us who can do, do: accumulate value into magnificent burn piles, which for a few centuries can represent and rationalize the noble effort. So few of us see who or what we are stealing the raw materials from. I cannot recall paintings of medieval deforestation, nor of gold mines in French colonies, nor of whatever Vichy meeting preserved Notre Dame from the Luftwaffe.

It’s not just an accumulation of wealth and aspiration, but of an attention that makes so many other things invisible. Some are pointing out, respectfully, that black churches are burning every week. Or that the dazzle of rose windows can distract us from who has been violated beneath them.

Of course there is a vow to rebuild. Because the scale is conceivable. In a great tradition, neo-feudalists can step forward to perform magnanimity. Don’t ask what they were doing with their 300M Euros yesterday.

The government will be invigorated by a reunification project. It will find common cause once again with captains of industry. Perhaps the yellow vests will be pacified, or even pitch in.

The cathedral will be rebuilt, with gusto and relief, because we cannot rebuild the Larsen Ice Shelf, nor replant the Amazon. Rebuilding will return us to the productivity we know, displacing an anxiety we cannot confess to any priest.

How will this not bolster white supremacy? From Moscow, Putin has offered to send elite carpenters. The subtext, tweeted a thousand times, is that Europe must band together to preserve itself from the refugees of the global fire it set alight.

They will pour more concrete, forge more steel, and harvest more trees. They will create and consecrate a simulation of the past. The completion date will be set for after the Paris Agreement deadlines. The finished project may feature holograms.

I grew up Catholic, in the age before climate chaos. I was taught to believe in God before I learned to listen to the world. I spent many hours in spaces that sought, with colonial affect, to mimic the grandeur of Notre Dame. I lit candles, gazed at the pierced heart, meditated on the vaults. I blinked at the statue of a nordic St. Michael skewering an African Lucifer with his golden lance. I played the pipe organ and sang soprano, and then tenor.

It was a troubled home. When I first visited Notre Dame in my 20s, I could feel its damp foundation. This was where I was from, but I didn’t feel at rest. I went through periods of fantasizing myself as a prodigal son, accepted once again. It never lasted. I loved my elders with a subtle disorganized attachment.

I’m certain I remember sitting in front of a Madonna and Child in Notre Dame, wondering What would she think of all this?

I wonder if I’ll see images of her again, with molten lead and charred latticework at her marble feet.

Despite itself, sometimes the old patriarchal literature captured a treasure. The scribes of Luke hinted at Mary’s foreboding. That she felt the fate of her strangely aware baby. That he would be murdered at a young age by priests and bureaucrats for suggesting that humans could take a different path. For some quip he would make about lilies in the field putting Solomon to shame.

The sculptors carve her holding him close, not against the elements, but against a civilization that builds its gorgeous prisons around them.

We can feel her warmth, and that nothing else matters. The roof needs no repair for this love to persist. She’s used to living in sheds. She’s used to not knowing when the end will come.

She would ask us not to rebuild, but to redirect. But she knows no one listens to her. She is Our Lady of the Extinction. She holds the baby, and every fear, and every moment of tenderness we muster. She treasures up all these things, and ponders them in her heart.

(04-18-2019, 11:42 AM)Spaced Wrote: I find it crazy that people are donating so much money to the rebuilding project. Over $1 Billion being donated to one of the richest organizations in the world. The Catholic Church is worth more than $100 Billion in total assets, they can afford to rebuild the church.

Imagine if the rich were this willing to donate to humanitarian causes. We could end poverty.