Karen Sweeney working for Australian Associated Press (AAP) is another ‘journalist’ who churns out the bigot’s news on Cardinal Pell’s High Court Appeal. This is the way she begins her report (Pell’s wait on High Court decision begins) of the submissions by Cardinal Pell’s lawyer Brad Walker and Prosecutor Kerri Judd (12th).
‘Disgraced Cardinal George Pell faces a further wait to learn whether his last-ditch bid for freedom has paid off or he’ll stay behind bars for years.
‘The High Court hasn’t yet granted the pedophile permission to appeal his five convictions for sexually abusing two choirboys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996.’
The gratuitous ‘disgraced’ and ‘pedophile’ immediately signals where she stands on Australia’s Alfred Dreyfus Affair.
She then goes on to give a slapdash report, placing a positive gloss on the prosecutor’s submission whom she obviously supports, as all journalists of her ilk do. Ideology, whatever degree of feminism consumes her, dictates the content and colour of her reporting.
Cardinal Pell represents everything about patriarchy she and her feminist cohorts despise. He should be in jail for that alone.
This sort of ideologically distorting reporting with its gratuitous insults is equivalent to lying.
Sweeney, like her feminist pals, has ignored the enormous contention worldwide about this case, many senior and academic lawyers expressing doubt about the running of the case, some outraged by what they call unabashed injustice. You would think on that ground alone Sweeney would be circumspect in her reporting. But, no, ideology and destruction of the patriarchy go before all else.
Apart from that, the case still has not been concluded. She and her fellow bigots just cannot hold back until the High Court Appeal concludes, can they?
AAP is owned by three Australian news organisations – News Corp Australia, Nine Entertainment Co., and Seven West Media. Nine owns 47%, News owns 45%, and Seven West 8%. Together these companies produce the vast majority of Australian newspapers.
Fr Velimir is an elderly priest who has a little difficulty with his legs. That did not stop him from offering Mass in the Extraordinary Rite (the Old Latin Rite) on Passion Sunday (yesterday).
For most people unfamiliar with the theory, one can recognise a Marxist by the social and political issues he supports and pushes. The vehemence of his beliefs and the abusive intolerance he displays is a secondary indication. These are the some of the causes he supports.
Abortion – sacrificing the innocence for convenience and demographic control, and killing the culture
Gay culture – same-sex union foremost, but any sort of union
Gender fluidity – destroying the idea of female and male
Transgenderism – surrender of reason to ideological conformism
Feminism – female ascendance and misandry
Identity politics – racist and class fragmenting of society
Open borders – destroying the culture
Multiculturalism – the fragmenting of the nation and establishment of tribal areas
Diversity – the elimination of the national culture and the imposition of a leftist conformism
Aboriginal separatism – establishing a superior political class on the basis of race
Destruction of Christianity, especially the Catholic Church who he sees as the originator and guardian of capitalist society
Elimination of the nuclear family which is a breeding ground for sexism, patriarchy and female oppression
Anti-white racism – eliminating the (perceived) originators of capitalism
Dismantling of Western Civilization – eliminating the great Oppressor
THE JUSTIFICATION There are two fundamental elements to the Marxist justification of these causes. The first is a (metaphysical) materialism. Materialism is the doctrine that there is nothing above or beyond the material world. Thus there are no objective moral standards, no preordained structure in the world. There is no God. But what separates materialist Marxism from a liberal materialism is the dialectic which Marx borrowed from Georg Hegel’s idealist philosophy. Dialectical theory is rather involved but in brief it is the idea that reality is conflictual and in continual flux. There are contradictions within the concepts that constitute our thinking. These contradictions gradually work themselves out, that is, evolve from a lower to higher order of understanding. In Marxism’s materialist dialectic, the conflict occurs preeminently between classes, between the perceived oppressor and oppressed. The clash of classes will lead to a higher order of material existence and eventually to some sort of utopian society. The ravage of established society with its enduring norms is of no account in the ineluctable progression of the dialectic. The most cherished beliefs of our Western culture are doomed.
The great opponent of Marxism is a philosophical conservatism with his realist metaphysics and epistemology. There are things out there over which a transcendent order prevails. The mind can recognise in the particulars of sense perception an intelligible order of abstract essences and necessary relations prior to particular things and contingent events. This explains why the ABC and the educational sector, both controlled by Marxists, will not tolerate a hint of conservatism, especially the conserving of Western Society. A stable world governed by a transcendent order is a hindrance to mass (Marxist) manipulation.
In January this year (2020), the ABC favoured the viewer with a flashy promo for their 2020 productions and imports. I thought to myself, well, this is something new. While the Marxist clique running the ABC has tried in the past to paper over their Marxist agenda, they have now dropped all pretence. Their frankness about their programs’ themes and preoccupations was almost disarming. In the current jargon, the ABC clique has come out proudly woke and are now geared up for a massive exercise in mass manipulation.
At the top of the clique’s list, the flag-bearer for the Marxist assault, is a three-part series on the Catholic Church. The series is titled REVELATION. Get it? The subtle Bible reference? Long-time faithful ABC foot soldier Sarah Ferguson was selected to front the series. Here is the ABC’s promo with a rather flattering photo of Ferguson (nothing wrong with that) against a background created by their best graphic designers (guess the significance of the nail and the faded cross):
Award-winning reporter Sarah Ferguson presents REVELATION, a ground-breaking documentary series on the criminal priests and brothers of the Catholic Church, their crimes laid bare for the first time in their own words.
One assumes the series is ground-breaking only because the ABC has enticed two priests serving long prison sentences to speak about their criminal abuse of pubescent boys. It can’t be for a general exposing of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. As anti-Catholic central, as bad as the worst of the bigoted Orangemen associations, the ABC has surely milked the sordid criminal story for all its worth, their burning zeal culminating in Australia’s very own Alfred Dreyfus Affair.
What could the confessions of the two priests add? And why does the ABC need three programs? An enormous amount of work goes into one investigative documentary. So, what has Ferguson and the ABC’s billion-dollar support staff dug up or concocted to fill the documentary equivalent of a Cecil B DeMille production? First, let me outline what they won’t talk about. In his popular Media Watch Dog (No. 488, 13 March), Gerard Henderson runs through the ABC neglect, hiding or suppression of important information about clerical and non-clerical sexual abuse.
Ferguson will ignore the same proportional level of sexual abuse in other associations (private, religious and governmental), creating the widely held belief that the incidence of sexual abuse is much higher in the Catholic Church. She will not mention that the greatest incidence of child abuse is within the circle of family and friends. Richard Neville’s confessed ‘hurrican f…’ with a 14-year-old schoolgirl will be passed over together with his counterculture book Play Power which contains an implicit approval of adult-child sex relations.
She will skip over the sexual abuse of poet Dorothy Hewitt’s daughters by Hewitt’s bohemian circle of friends. Bob Ellis was one to enjoy her daughters. Speaking about the experience later, daughter Rozanna said, ‘We were brought up in a very bohemian environment and some of those experiences were worse than others.’ Her sister Kate stressed ‘that the incidents that occurred in her childhood weren’t just restricted to the Sydney arts scene. Instead, she said it was part of a larger cultural problem at the time.’ (Sydney Morning Herald’s Dorothy Hewett’s daughters say grown men preyed on them as children.)
This ‘larger cultural problem at the time’ is, I suggest, of fundamental importance in any discussion about the high incidence of sexual abuse from the1960s to the 1990s, not just in religious institutions. (I devote a chapter to the 1960s sexual revolution in my book TONY ABBOTT AND THE TIMES OF REVOLUTION). Nor will Ferguson mention the ABC’s refusal to talk about its own case of child sexual abuse and the favourable comment about pederasty by a former ABC chairman (see Henderson).
Perhaps most telling is the ABC’s looking away from a critical feature of Catholic clerical sexual abuse. Around 80 percent of the cases is about male-on-male or same-sex abuse. The incidence of priestly abuse of pubescence males rose at the same rate as the entry of homosexuals into the priesthood. This a fact. Ferguson will not face the significance. She doesn’t dare. Finally, on these main points, I expect Ferguson and her ABC pals to be ignorant of the investigative work, ironically by traditional Catholic groups, into the homosexual networks in the American Church. There is talk of ‘Lavender Seminaries’ and the ‘gay mafia’. There is plenty of literature on this subject.
The cover-up in many cases was not to protect the institutional church by despicable conservative prelates, but the homosexual networks. The dramatic defrocking of Cardinal McCarrick, de facto leader of the American Church, gives a grisly view of this type of clerical double-cabinet and its protection. Why not in Australia?
What, then, will Ferguson’s three programs be about? I predict that she will use the two priests as a cynical weapon to strike hard and deep into the Catholic Church. I mean the traditional Church of two thousand years, not that of the dissenters and heretics whose parading pretence is nauseating.
Despite the two jailed priests being responsible for their own actions and despite their actions contradicting the Church’s sexual morality, Ferguson and her crew will work to minimise their guilt and shift it to the institutional church. Ultimately, it will be the Church’s beliefs, its structure and its male hierarchy that will be blamed. It will be interesting to see how far she drags Cardinal Pell into her case. You can be sure he’ll be there as ABC enemy No.1 in some form.
The viewer will be treated to the heterodox views of a string of Catholic ‘theologians’ and academics to which will be paid grovelling wide-eyed respect. The dissenters’ favourite causes will pass in review: priestly celibacy, married priests, homosexual relations, indeed, the full parade of LGBTQ+ issues, the lack of women in the hierarchical clergy and in executive positions, in a word, all the feminist demands against a patriarchal church. Ferguson might even extend the blame for the priests’ criminal acts to the prohibition of communion for the divorced and remarried. She might as well throw that in, too.
The object will be to support a fundamental change to the Catholic Church as envisaged by the dissenters, the parallel magisterium, from Vatican II to the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
I have stuck my neck out. Let’s see if I have to recant. I might add that I have not plucked all this out of thin air. Whether I am right or wrong in the details, what I have outlined is the way the ABC thinks about the Catholic Church.
The first episode of REVELATION will be on Tuesday 17 March 2020.
After all I have read and written on the injustice of Cardinal Pell’s jailing, never finding any reason to change my mind, I realise that it comes down the prayer in the end, given the bitter unrelenting forces private, governmental and institutional lined up against the cardinal. One prays that the High Court judges today receive an infusion of grace so that they can see the injustice and move to correct it. Cardinal Pell’s intentions have been daily in my prayers from the beginning.
La Trobe University law professor Patrick Keyzer believes it will, not that he said it in those words. What amounted to the same thing, he told Chip Legrand in today’s Sydney Morning Herald that the High Court will likely dismiss the appeal – and keep an innocent man in jail. The Australian system of law has failed so dramatically in Cardinal Pell’s case that I fear she could be right.
Does this academic lawyer understand that a High Court dismissal will cause an explosion of contempt around the world for Australia? Probably not. He appears so wrapped up in his academic bubble that the Cardinal’s fate is of no account. As long as the technical processes of the law are satisfied, what could he care?
A dismissal will rock and split Australia for decades to come.
Today Chris Friel posted a short ‘Restatement of a Significant Piece of Evidence in the Pell Case’.
“He didn’t say in evidence or committal or anywhere that the wine bottle was in the sink area. He said it was in the alcove area … So he always maintained that the wine bottle was there in the alcove. He never maintained it was in that new sink area we know exists now.” – Mark Gibson, Closing Address.
In the Crown’s closing address to the jury the Crown made much of this indication, and the Crown have repeated the “significant” point in their submission to the High Court. However, in a number of papers now I have argued that beyond reasonable doubt these claims are factually incorrect. No doubt, after it became apparent that the “new sink area” was once a wardrobe, the story shifted and was then maintained consistently. It had to because, not only does the idea of finding wine in the wardrobe gives the lie to the claim that the complainant was remembering the place as it was in 1996, but also it indicates embarrassingly, that this so-called knowledge dates from after 2004 implying that the complainant must have been coached somehow.
In a single page I intend to point out the basis on which I argue my claims. There are five strands.
John Ferguson in his acceptably balanced commentary on the Pell case in the Australian of 7 March gets one thing wrong. He says:
‘The prosecution also argues that Team Pell glosses over the quality of the evidence provided by A, who correctly identified the location of the first offending and correctly described the layout of the priests’ sacristy.‘
What evidence? In previous posts , I demonstrated how Keith Windschuttle and Chris Friel ripped to shreds the choirboy’s account of the priests’ sacristy. The choirboy described the sacristy as it was after alterations, not as it was in 1996. See the previous posts.
Ferguson covers what the legal professionals and academics think about the case. As someone for years immersed in the thought of Edmund Burke, I want to make a distinction between legal theory (abstract thinking) and what ordinary everyday reasoning tells one about the concrete world we live in.
Burke who made a distinction between the ‘politician in action’ and a professor of politics, said that the total reliance on abstract speculation in politics risked a destructive rupture between the concrete and the abstract. He compared the British Constitution (in the broad sense) that had formed over time with the actions of the French revolutionaries who were driven by theory. The dreadful excesses of the revolution were the result, as they were in the Russian Revolution driven my Marxism.
The High Court of Australia may reject the appeal on the basis of fine legal distinctions, but it won’t stop the ordinary person concentrating on the concrete circumstances, free from the obscurantism of legal theory and legal technique.
How can one believe that Cardinal Pell, notorious for his rigid views, a stickler for correct routine and ritual, and just risen to the exalted position of Archbishop of Melbourne, deviate from his characteristic behaviour and risk everything in a highly risky criminal act? It not only goes against his character and habits, but it defies a person fundamental reasoning powers. It is insane behaviour.
It is just as insane as suggesting gay activist Alan Joyce would abuse the son of one of his employees just when all were celebrating his rising to take control of one of Australia’s cultural icons.
Similarly, how could someone knowing the routine of a Catholic Solemn High Mass offered by an archbishop believe that the highly visible archbishop without his many attendants somehow exited the processional, passed a crowd of people unseen, and arrived at the priests’ sacristy where he had time to commit three sexual assaults? It is too much to believe – except for those with political and ideological investment.
In the long run, the issue is political and ideological. Cardinal Pell is a strong political and religious conservative. He is the common enemy of the left in politics and religion. There are many on the clerical left who hate his guts.
Millions upon millions of dollars have been lost to scammers because of appearance. Phone calls allegedly from the tax department and Microsoft Windows have netted heaps of money because they sounded convincing. Emails appearing to be from the major banks, cleverly composed and photoshopped, have also netted millions. Scammers, con artists, imposters, swindlers and the like succeed because they appear convincing.
Conning the innocent, the gullible and the bigoted will always provide a rich field for the petty crook and the malevolent political operator at the highest level. Keith Windschuttle, in his most recent piece (see previous post), quoted senior Crown prosecutor Christopher Boyce’s self-described reaction to the courtroom performance of Cardinal Pell’s accuser, the choirboy with the chocolate drop eyes. Boyce told the court:
The responses that you see there, not only that you read there, but did you see there — and the manner in which they’re delivered; at the end of those, one puts down one’s pen and stares blankly at the screen and is moved. At that point, in my respectful submission, any prima facie at least, any doubt that one might have had about the account, prima facie, is removed.
Is he serious? Is he fair dinkum – in the Aussie way? Of course , he’s not. It’s all theatre. Deceitful theatre. He is out to manipulate the feelings of those who, in this case, are willing to be manipulated. A nice effective con.
You can be sure the last thing Crown Prosecutor Christopher Boyce would do in his private life is accept people merely on appearance when much is personally at stake.
I am reminded of the Seinfeld episode when Jerry asks George (Costanza) how he could live with himself after George barrelled his way through a kids party to escape a fire. George answered: ‘It’s not easy.’
One might wonder how easy it is for Chief Justice Anne Ferguson. One might ask whether she was serious when she said (also quoted in Windschuttle’s piece) of the choirboy’s performance:
Both the content of the answers, and the manner of their delivery, were said to be such as to eliminate any doubt a juror might have had. In our view, this was a very significant part of [the choirboy’s] evidence. It was rightly characterised as compelling, both because of the clarity and cogency of what [the choirboy] said and because of the complete absence of any indication of contrivance in the emotion which [the choirboy] conveyed when giving his answers.
I am reminded of those occasions when John McEnroe screamed at the court empire out of frustration: ‘You can’t be serious!’ The empires had better grounds for retort than the majority with their purple prose.
No unbiased person of normal intelligence trusts a person on mere appearance when much is personally at stake.
Keith Windschuttle’s latest essay on the Pell Affair, ‘How the Rome Interview changed Choirboy’s Story’ shows what an appalling farce of injustice Victoria Police and Louise Milligan made of the complainant’s story to make the case against Cardinal Pell stick.
It is essentially this. The choirboy spun one story of what happened, which was gobbled up by the police and Milligan. This story prevailed between 2015 and 2016 when the police interviewed the cardinal in Rome. It was the version that Cardinal Pell and his lawyers had received from the police before the meeting. There were huge problems with this story as Windschuttle points out, so big that the police had to patch over the problems. The second patched-up version was sprung on Cardinal Pell and his lawyer whose bemusement at the discrepancies between the two versions is evident in the video of the interview. Windschuttle concludes:
‘What this indicates is that the case against Pell was never some immutable truth embedded in the choirboy’s memory. It was an evolving story created by the police and their sole witness, which they treated as a work in progress, and one which they could, when confronted with obstacles or inconsistencies, change at will.
‘So the story that impressed the Crown prosecutor so much that he put down his pen and stared blankly at the screen was not the only version of these events told by the choirboy and those who coached him. Moreover, the later story was so different to the first version that it must have incorporated a whole new range of fictions about the timing and location of the alleged abuse, and who was doing what and when, all of which must have borne their own share of invention too. In other words, those who found the choirboy such an impressive witness were very easily persuaded.’
The willingness of the media to do their own patching-up (favourable to the ‘boy’) is demonstrated by Windschuttle’s quotation from Megan Palin’s piece on that grubby little woke online operation news.com.au/
