PELL SIMPLY REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE PICTURES - BOTH BIG AND SMALL!

This article appeared in The Age newspaper on Saturday 17 November 2012. Chrissie Foster and her family have waited a long time for this to happen. Now that it has been announced by the federal government, let us hope that the terms of the royal commission will not be full of weasel words that allow the Catholic church an out to escape the blame and responsibility of all these decades of obfuscation and hiding behind their "traditions" such as confessionals and the like. Pell defrocked? Now that would be something to behold!

So much heartbreak, so much pain, it's about time

November 17, 2012
By Chrissie Foster

Happy bedtime: Chrissie Foster with Aimee, Emma and Katie before their world was shattered.
I COULD never stand to live in a world without justice and truth: at last there will be a platform for both. Prime Minister Julia Gillard's announcement of a royal commission on child sexual abuse has brought to an end the cries from victims and victim supporters. Of course, there have been many tears this week. More will be shed. But the royal commission is a cause for celebration.
For my family, the struggle to achieve this breakthrough began 16 years ago, on March 26, 1996. This was the day my daughter Emma, after almost a year of starving her 13-year-old body to an emaciated 41 kilograms, numerous self-harming horrors and attempts to take her own life, disclosed that our parish priest had sexually assaulted her. Not once, but on many occasions over her primary school years.
Fifteen months later more horror and heartbreak surfaced through a half-finished suicide note from our second daughter, Katie. She had hidden the note in a shoebox. It was written in her very neatest handwriting. Katie had been another victim of our parish priest.
There was no cure for my much-loved daughters. The pain never leaves. After years of subsequent torment, Emma took her own life at the age of 26. Katie, while drunk after binge drinking, was hit by a car in 1999 (she was 15) and still receives 24-hour care as a result of her injuries.
There are many of these stories. Ours is not rare. The Prime Minister's announcement was a godsend, proof that our many voices have been heard and believed, at long last. It feels like justice. The burning truth has ignited a light and we must shine it on the Catholic Church because of its cover-up. The Catholic hierarchy fiercely lobbied against a royal commission. But a royal commission had to be called. The claim from the hierarchy and biased commentators - that the Catholic Church is no different to other organisations in relation to child sex crimes and cover-ups - is nonsense. On the first day of the Victorian parliamentary inquiry I sat and listened to the evidence of Victoria Police and three professors.
All stated they would speak only about the Catholic Church. They based their submissions on records and research. Facts. Catholic Church sex offenders committed six times more sexual assaults on children than all the other religions combined. At least one in 20 Melbourne priests was a child sex offender, but the real figure was probably one in 15. There was a systemic obstruction of police inquiries over five decades.
Officers in two police forces - Victoria and New South Wales - have made allegations of extensive church interference with investigations. The royal commission should look closely at this. It should examine the influence of the religious leaders on police and governments.
Why did state governments allow the church's flawed and destructive Melbourne Response and Towards Healing schemes to exist unchallenged for more than 15 years? At his media conference on Tuesday, Cardinal George Pell, ignoring the Victorian inquiry's expert evidence, chose to blame the ''press'' for a ''smear'' campaign against the Catholic Church. But the media is not the problem. Along with brave victims willing to go to police despite their trauma, the ''press'' has helped find a solution. If journalists had not written and broadcast stories of crimes and cover-ups, the likes of Father Gerald Ridsdale and countless other convicted criminal priests would still be celebrating Mass in Australia's Catholic parishes.
One thing is certain: the priesthood never lifted a finger to protect children from ongoing sexual assaults and rapes. Rather, the church paid for the paedophiles' legal defences. Not one priest or brother did it help jail.
Cardinal Pell said the confessional seal was ''inviolable''. I say the lives and bodies of our children are inviolable. Why should a foreign state law - the Vatican's Canon Law - override our Australian laws in protecting our children?
To understand why the confessional seal must be broken to protect children, we need only look at evidence given to a Queensland court in 2004. Father Michael McArdle, after pleading guilty to and being convicted of child sexual assault offences, swore an affidavit. In it he stated he had confessed to sexually assaulting children 1500 times to 30 different priests over a 25-year period.
Every one of those ''good'' priests, as if of one mind and voice, said to the criminal: ''Go home and pray.'' Is that what they are taught to say to each other when told of such crimes? Not one of the 30 priests urged him to get help or go to police. Nor did they report his crimes. The victims were abandoned to become hurting adults, their lives shattered. Distraught. Suicidal.
This is a rare insight into the secret world of paedophile priest confession. We must learn from it. The church system was designed to protect the priest and church from scandal. It was not established to consider the futures of Australia's children. We must not be distracted by the confusion and side issues thrown our way by the church hierarchy.
If mandatory reporting had been enforced at McArdle's first confession, then the next 25 years of pain and suffering for children would never have occurred. The guilt of which he was unburdened though confession only served him to reoffend within the same week. Cardinal Pell said he welcomed the royal commission. Why then did he deny its need just the previous day and the 20 years before?
Recently he spoke of a ''cancer'' in the church. He is part of that cancer. Perhaps it is time for Cardinal Pell to step down and hand over to another cleric who possesses some empathy and compassion for children.
As for the royal commission, the government must strive to write the best terms of reference that encompass the essential need to expose child sexual assault and its cover-up in organisations.
Justice and accountability are needed for past crimes against children. Though it will not help my daughters, this will ensure change and safety for all future children. Only with this reality will victims become survivors.
Chrissie Foster is the co-author of "Hell On The Way To Heaven".

POPE AND PELL ON GOOD FRIDAY - THE DRIVEL MIXTURE AS BEFORE!

The following article was in the Herald Sun on 18 April 2011 and some of the postings following the article would possibly be in the category of "my religion right or wrong!" Well into the 21st century and the drivel of religion goes on and on and on!!! Will they never learn??

Let's hound evil clergy

By Alan Howe

From: Herald Sun

April 18, 2011



Spring Street should investigate the Catholic church's handling of sex abuse cases, argues Alan Howe. HWT Image Library

OVER his journey from the seminary in 1942 until a belated meeting with his maker in March 1997, the bisexual Catholic paedophile Father Kevin O'Donnell destroyed any number of lives as he raped his way through generations of Victorian schoolchildren.

Of course he was not alone. Too many Catholic priests were doing the same. Too often others -- sometimes quite senior -- were aware of the grotesque lifestyles of clergy who took pleasure in forced sex with minors, perhaps even seeing it as a privilege.

Often these criminals were moved on to other parishes. Father O'Donnell was shuffled about quite a bit. He'd have loved that; all those fresh faces of smiling innocents gazing up respectfully at the cloaked man their church insisted was "reverend". If only they had known it was the devil staring back, his brain squirming with hard-to-mask glee at so many new opportunities.

How O'Donnell must have sniggered with delight in the girls and boys calling him "father" as he removed their clothes and gorged on their innocence, sometimes at that very moment sentencing them to short, unhappy lives of fear, uncertainty, self-hate and then suicide.

Father O'Donnell didn't care.

When he died -- still a priest, notwithstanding having served too short a time in jail after admitting abusing children -- the then Melbourne Archbishop George Pell said: "He's met his God. He's had to answer for his actions and I hope he's repentant".

Crikey, so do I. Pell's predecessor, Sir Frank Little, said I am unavoidably off to hell, and I'd rather not spend eternity with the repugnant rapist Father O'Donnell just because he wouldn't repent. But I find it hard to believe he would have.

All of Victoria is familiar with the story of Chrissie and Anthony Foster, how Father O'Donnell raped their daughters Emma and Katie at the Sacred Heart Primary School in Oakleigh, and the Fosters' battle for justice from a defiant Catholic Church.

Emma developed deep-seated psychological problems, turned to drugs and died alone of an overdose, aged 26, on the floor of her room clutching a teddy, a present from her loving parents for her first birthday.

Half her life had been spent struggling with the legacy of Father O'Donnell's crimes.

Emma's sister Katie dulled her memories of his hate-filled attacks -- surely the reverend despised his victims -- with alcohol, later being hit by a drunk driver leaving her severely mentally and physically disabled for life.

Recently, copies of Chrissie Foster's book about their experiences, Hell on The Way To Heaven, which she wrote with ABC TV's Paul Kennedy, were presented to the Victorian Parliamentary Library.

Speaking at that event, the Member for Oakleigh, Ann Barker, revealed that she had sent a copy of the book to the Attorney-General, Robert Clark, accompanying a letter seeking to meet him to discuss the terms of reference for what Ms Barker described as "a desperately needed, truly independent state-commissioned inquiry in to the church policies and actions."

When the scope of the sex abuse problem became clearer in the mid-1990s, the Catholic Church hired Melbourne's best lawyers as it moved to defend its reputation, and perhaps its assets. Many would argue -- the Fosters certainly do -- that less attention was paid to the victims' welfare, to seeking out the criminal rapists in church ranks, and to punishing them severely.

The church knew it had a problem, but its attitude to it was depressing and, sometimes, breathtaking.

When the Fosters told Father O'Donnell's successor of the priest's acts he seemed concerned, but immediately said: "Don't tell anyone."

The late Monsignor Gerry Cudmore, the Vicar General, said, astonishingly: "We didn't know the effect it (sexual abuse) would have on children." Cudmore said he didn't believe the church "understood paedophilia".

Father O'Donnell did. It was his full-time occupation around which he might be able to squeeze in some marriage ceremonies, or the odd christening. He had christened Emma.

THEN Archbishop George Pell wrote to Emma, in a letter dated August 26, 1998, acknowledging her abuse at the hands of Father O'Donnell, whom he named.

A paltry offer of compensation was made in a letter from church lawyers five days later, a "realistic alternative to litigation that will otherwise be strenuously defended", it menacingly reported.

What? The church not admit in court that the abuse had taken place if the Fosters turned its money down?

That is exactly what it did.

In documents lodged in court on May 7, 2004, the church's lawyers wrote that the defendants "do not admit the plaintiff was subjected to physical and/or sexual and/or psychological abuse while an infant by Kevin O'Donnell".

That's not what Archbishop Pell had said six years earlier.

Did you note also that O'Donnell's "father" title is missing? Interesting that because, shamefully, the church never did defrock him. He died as Father O'Donnell.

This week Pell's successor, Archbishop Denis Hart, who accepts the girls were attacked by Father O'Donnell, said that the Fosters' writ "made allegations that differed from what they had told the Independent Commissioner".

Emma's evidence to the church's independent commissioner was in strict confidence, yet here, it would seem, Archbishop Hart is discussing it.

He also said this week that the "legal proceedings were settled upon the Fosters accepting a substantial amount". Strange that, because the amount they received was also in strictest confidence and I am surprised that here the Archbishop hints at it.

In any case, what is "substantial" when your daughters' lives have been ruined? I'd consider no amount substantial. I find trying to calculate what might be substantial as a quite vulgar exercise.

Of course it goes without saying that he also "does not believe an inquiry is warranted".

Here's why the archbishop is wrong: In response to one of my questions last week, Archbishop Hart "reiterates his commitment that priests who are found to have committed serious offences against children will not be returned to ministry".

Serious! What does serious mean? And who decides what is serious?

What about banning all priests who commit any offence against children?

Or might there be too many?