“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Cardinal Pell … Well, Well, Well …
The slow martyrdom of Cardinal George Pell began in Australia but ended in Rome on January 10, 2023. His resurrection continues from the ash heap of his good name.
The slow martyrdom of Cardinal George Pell began in Australia but ended in Rome on January 10, 2023. His resurrection continues from the ash heap of his good name.
January 7, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
Cardinal George Pell passed from this life unexpectedly on January 10, 2023. The official cause of death was a cardiac arrest in a Rome hospital after routine surgery for a hip replacement. His death came as a great shock to the many people around the world who prayed and worked for his release from prison on false charges of sexual abuse dating back decades. The false charges were exposed, and his wrongful conviction disposed of in a unanimous decision of the seven members of Australia’s highest court on Tuesday of Holy Week in 2020.
As I did every year for the life of this blog, I wrote a Holy Week post in 2020 that was published on the day after Cardinal Pell’s exoneration. My Holy Week post then was “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.” Only later did I see connections in the symbolism within that post and what had been going on in Australia and Rome in regard to accusations against Cardinal Pell at that time. I never consciously intended the connection, but on the day previous to its publishing, Pell emerged from his darkness into a brighter Australian light. At the end of that same month, on April 29, 2020, I published “From Down Under, The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”
There were some in Australia who refused to accept the findings of the High Court even though there was never any credible evidence against Pell. Some suggested that even if innocent, he should remain in prison to atone for the sins of other priests. One Australian commenter wrote on the Australia Wrongful Convictions Report site: “Why not just drop the Pell case? It is controversial. Besides, he is deceased. I suspect Pell is guilty.” So, in the eyes of some in Australia and beyond, actual evidence of guilt, or the lack thereof, means nothing. Guilt or innocence is purely an emotional affair depending upon the whims or prejudice of any person following the case. So why have trials, and why have appeals? It is a tragedy that Cardinal Pell spent 405 days in an Australia prison having his evidence-free guilt affirmed by two appellate courts before one, the Highest Court, came unanimously to its senses. And still, some in Australia would not accept that conclusion. It was left to the rest of the world to conclude that prejudice has a secure home Down Under. To its great credit, the Australia-based Wrongful Convictions Report courageously took up the High Court’s finding and reported on it justly. In “Week of Pell’s ‘Resurrection’” marking the first anniversary of Pell’s death, Andrew L. Urban, moderator of Wrongful Convictions Report, wrote
Within the space of a couple of days this week, several voices were heard in the public square ‘resurrecting’ the late Cardinal Pell, dismissing the notion that he was guilty of sexual abuse, a notion that some maintained even after the High Court’s 7-0 decision to quash that conviction.
On the first anniversary of Cardinal Pell’s death in Rome, this extraordinary case continues to make ripples in the law and society. In the law, it is prompting yet another call for the establishment of a Criminal Cases Review Commission. In society it is challenging those whose animosity and antagonism against Pell remain firmly in place, defying the High Court’s decision, referring to the verdict a result of a jury not “acting rationally.” It also brings to the forefront the conviction in December 2023 of Pell’s Vatican adversary, Cardinal Becciu on charges of embezzlement and money laundering.
On Friday, January 12, 2024 in Australia:
Former High Court justice Michael Kirby has described a new edition of Gerard Henderson’s book, Cardinal Pell, The Media Pile On & Collective Guilt, as “an important contribution to the efforts to establish a Criminal Cases Review Commission” in Australia.
Mr Kirby said basic evidence in the case showed “a very serious doubt was raised as to Cardinal Pell’s guilt”, adding: “Effective protections against miscarriages of justice must be there for all serious cases, even for a cardinal.”
The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, marked the first anniversary of Pell’s death in Rome of a heart attack after hip surgery with the strongest Church statements yet about the Cardinal’s charges, conviction and imprisonment on sexual abuse charges and his later “unanimous High Court exoneration”.
At St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney on Wednesday, Archbishop Fisher said: “Following a media, political and police witch hunt, Cardinal Pell was tried and imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. Even after he was unanimously exonerated by the High Court he continued to be demonized by some.”
Archbishop Fisher told The Australian: “The Pell case was a serious miscarriage of justice. So far there has been no inquiry into the actions of the police or how the legal system managed to get this so wrong. Perhaps worst of all, there seems to be no mood in Victoria for a serious inquiry into the justice system.”
The Australian also reports that “A separate telephone tap has also revealed a conversation in which one person tells another ‘the highway is open to you’ after Pell was charged. Vatican investigators have been told money was sent to Australia to adversely affect the case against the Cardinal.”
On Wednesday January 10, 2024 in America:
Wrongfully convicted Fr Gordon J. MacRae writes from his prison cell in New Hampshire:
The case against Cardinal George Pell was …. influenced by nefarious machinations, including police and prosecutor corruption. This was at the heart of a curious incident related in Prison Journal (Volume 1, p. 329). At a pretrial hearing on Cardinal Pell’s false sexual abuse charges, among the most difficult charges to defend against, a Melbourne, Australia priest who was present in the court told Pell’s supporters that he prays that the prosecutor will “mess up his presentation.” When that actually happened, the priest reportedly said, “See, my prayers are working!” When Cardinal Pell was told of this he said, “I would have much preferred that he prayed for justice to be done.”
Those were the spontaneous words of an innocent man who believed that justice in this life is possible — even likely. The guilty on the other hand engage in any number of contrived machinations to do an end run around the law. When a defendant is innocent and there is no evidence supporting the charge, it is too often police and prosecutors who resort to machinations to do an end run around the law.
There is a vivid example of this on the same page of Pell’s Prison Journal cited above. Detective Sgt. Kevin Carson of the Ballarat, Australia Police Department produced a report claiming that sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Victoria — where Pell was facing trial — was responsible for forty-three suicides. After the shocking story was leaked to tabloid media, a parliamentary inquiry into the Church’s handling of sexual abuse was launched. An inquiry is similar to a grand jury report in the United States.
The police set up an investigation, but were able to identify only twenty-five of the forty-three named by Detective Carson. Of those twenty-five names, only sixteen had committed suicide. But only one of the sixteen had been assaulted by a member of the clergy. As Pell himself pointed out, “One is one too many, but one is not forty-three.” This tendency to “heighten the hype” lends itself to unfair trials and wrongful convictions, but it also lends itself to career advancement, a shamefully strong force in many of the U.S. grand jury reports on Catholic clergy.
In his analysis of the Cardinal Becciu trial in The Wall Street Journal …, Francis X. Rocca included the following paragraph:
“Around that time, [Pope] Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers. Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican. But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external auditing firm. Pell considered [Cardinal] Becciu his main opponent …. Other Vatican officials also lobbied the Pope against Pell’s changes. The Pope curtailed Pell’s powers and the external audit was cancelled. Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges. He was acquitted on appeal and died” [on January 10, 2023].
In an October 15, 2023 published commentary on Mr. Rocca’s account in The Wall Street Journal, [Father MacRae] added some further context to the story:
“The part of this nebulous story that most troubles me is the decision of the Pope to listen to Cardinal Becciu and other Vatican officials who lobbied against Cardinal George Pell’s financial reforms even after [ the Pope] had empowered him to reform Vatican finances. Mr. Rocca does not speculate on the source of charges against Cardinal Pell in Australia — charges for which he was exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s High Court. This was after he wrongly spent 400 days in prison. There are many who believe that there may have been a connection between these false charges and Cardinal Pell’s attempted reforms of Vatican finances. Pell himself suspected this.”
— “Week of Pell’s ‘Resurrection’” by Andrew L. Urban
Cardinal Pell, Post-Resurrection
His Eminence Cardinal George Pell, served just over 400 days and nights in an Australian prison before justice finally awakened and sanity finally set in. His guilty verdict was upheld in two attempts at appeal leaving people of just heart and mind around the world scratching their heads. I wrote an early post on this case from the point of view of someone for whom justice had also evaporated into mindless prejudice. My post was “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia.”
On the day I write this, I mark 11,051 days in a U.S. prison for crimes that never took place. I do not know if Cardinal Pell was pressured into accepting a deal, but a deal presented to me was that I could leave prison in one year if I plead guilty. I refused the deal. I do not write this as a comparison of our woes. The number of days does not matter. Anything beyond a single day of wrongful imprisonment for fictitious crimes is, as Catholic League President Bill Donohue described it, a Travesty of Justice.
I rejoiced as justice and freedom were restored to Cardinal Pell, but the insults against him were not over. On January 10, 2023 he died from a heart attack after routine hip-replacement surgery. His body was returned to Australia for interment, and upon arrival it was discovered that some postmortem wounds were mysteriously inflicted upon his body. This magnified our grief, which may actually have been the point. This has never been explained.
But the final words on Cardinal Pell were not the lies of his detractors. It was one of the proudest moments of my life as a priest to learn that while I was writing about Pell from my prison cell in New Hampshire, he was simultaneously writing about me from his prison cell half a world away in Australia. The following excerpts are from his magnificent spiritual biography from the darkest days of his life. These excerpts are from his Prison Journal Volume 2 written in the dark days between his failed appeals and the final awakening of Australia’s High Court. These excerpts, played a small role in restoring his freedom. Today they also play a role in restoring mine:
Source: Prison Journal Volume 2, pp 57-60, Ignatius Press 2021, Entry of Friday, 2 August 2019:
“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog Beyond These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.
“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australian media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.
“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’ Fr MacRae recounts the extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windschuttle, editor of the quality journal, Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ [See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell.’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019].
“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in April, 2015]. Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.
“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019.
“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.
“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.
“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from BTSW ‘About’],
‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’”
— George Cardinal Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 57-60
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EPILOGUE BY FATHER GORDON MACRAE
There is a background story about the origin of the false charges against Cardinal Pell. It came out of the United States when a young con man was allowed to use a pseudonym, Billy Doe, to bring phony charges against several Catholic priests, one of whom died in prison. The story was propelled forward by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine. It has been exposed as fraudulent, including here at Beyond These Stone Walls in “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”
Thank you for reading, pondering, and sharing this important story. I have known many priests who have been falsely accused. In some of those cases the accusations fell apart and the heavy burden of false witness was removed from the nightmarish existence of those priests. Many were so scarred by the current process of American bishops that presumed the guilt of any priest accused and then banished them instantly from any ministry and even from living on any Church property. Once relieved from the burden of false witness most of these priests simply remained in silent exile rather than risk ever becoming targets again.
It was not so for Cardinal Pell. With his life and freedom restored he returned to Rome and spoke in every forum that would welcome him about the ordeal he endured and about what could make such an unjust situation more just. He wrote a letter to me in prison assuring me of his deeply felt concern and fraternal support. He wrote of his resolve to raise my case in Rome at every opportunity.
But he never got the chance. He died unexpectedly during routine hip surgery at a Rome hospital on January 10, 2023. Three days earlier on January 7, 2023 he preached his last homily to the Caritas in Veritates — Magnificat Dominium Community at San Giovanni Rotondo. That homily is our feature this week at Voices from Beyond.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell
Shunned by some Catholic media, wrongly imprisoned Fr Gordon MacRae appears prominently in the Prison Journal of Cardinal George Pell published by Ignatius Press.
Shunned by some Catholic media, wrongly imprisoned Fr Gordon MacRae appears prominently in the Prison Journal of Cardinal George Pell published by Ignatius Press.
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald author of “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?”
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October 13, 2021
I was incensed recently to learn of the treatment one of Fr Gordon MacRae’s most important recent posts received from a purportedly Catholic online venue. His eye-opening post, “A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America,” was typed, as he described it, “ten minutes at a time here and there” on whatever typewriter wasn’t already in use in the prison library where he works. He had to type half on one machine and the rest on another. He finished it seconds before a deadline for getting it into the mail on time.
And it was a blockbuster, shared to date about 5,000 times on Facebook alone. Some 800 members of Linkedin read it. Over the next week, thousands came to it from around the Globe, including many thousands in the United States. Many who read that post learned of Father G for the first time and were aghast at the story it told.
Then the heavy hammer of jaundiced Catholic judgment fell. With the help of a friend outside, that post was shared at the r/Catholicism community at Reddit which boasts some 129,000 members. A multitude of positive comments poured in, and then suddenly stopped. On September 28, Father MacRae received this message read to him in prison from his Gmail inbox. It was from the unnamed r/Catholicism moderator at Reddit:
“You are permanently banned from participating in r/Catholicism. You can still view and subscribe, but you won’t be allowed to post or comment. Due to the nature of your participation, we cannot permit you to continue participating in the r/Catholicism community.”
This suppression of a much respected voice in the public square is shameful and merciless. I cannot see any difference between this and recent decisions at Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon to cancel voices that do not stick to an established media narrative. The fact that this suppression was done in the name of a self-described Catholic community is an outrage, especially given the conditions under which this priest has to write.
Fr Stuart MacDonald, JCL, the Canon Law advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls, attempted to engage the r/Catholicism moderator with a statement that, despite his imprisonment, Fr MacRae is quite widely considered to be innocent of his charges, has not been dismissed from the clerical state, and has earned the respect of thousands of Catholics including priests and bishops.
Father MacDonald’s intervention was simply ignored.
The Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell
Now contrast this treatment with that from another prominent Catholic voice in the public square, that of Cardinal George Pell. Formerly the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, Cardinal Pell had been appointed by Pope Francis to serve as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy of the Holy See and the Vatican Council of Cardinals, a body of eight close advisors to the pope.
Then, like Father MacRae, Cardinal Pell was tragically accused of “historic” sexual abuse alleged to have occurred decades earlier in Australia. Also like Father MacRae, he was convicted in a sham trial without evidence despite a multitude of inconsistency and fraud surrounding his trial. This, too, was a case shamelessly tried in the media before it ever got to a court of law. The 78-year-old prelate was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison on March 13, 2019. It was, as was the Father MacRae trial, a case of prosecutorial “Trophy Justice.”
On November 3, 1170, King Henry II raged in public against Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The latter had rightly challenged the King’s claim to ultimate authority over Catholic affairs and the discipline of priests. When the King asked aloud, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” four of his guards took it upon themselves to murder Becket during Mass in the Canterbury Cathedral.
Not that much has changed in a thousand years. Unlike most other Catholic journalists, I am no longer going to make any reference to the “abuse crisis” in the Church. It is now the “accuse crisis” in the Church. Any priest can be “gotten rid of” by a mere accusation of uncorroborated sexual impropriety dating back decades. It is, as Father MacRae described in a stand-out article at Linkedin, “A Weapon of Mass Destruction: Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.”
Many thinking people long suspected, and now know without a doubt, that Cardinal George Pell was entirely innocent of the claims against him. Following a first failed appeal, he served 13 months in the harshness of prison in solitary confinement before sanity returned to Australian justice. Finally, in a unanimous 7-to-0 decision, he was exonerated by the Australian High Court. The victory was not just his alone, but that of the entire Church too long held hostage by the “accuse crisis.”
During his time in prison, Cardinal Pell kept a journal that today has been hailed as a masterpiece of prison writing in the ranks of Saint Paul of Tarsus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Father Walter Ciszek, and Saint Thomas More. Archbishop Charles Chaput described the Pell journal with clarity:
“Two lessons emerge from this astonishing work. The first is the length to which a hate-filled judicial process will go against an innocent man. The second is the power of a good man’s endurance in the face of humiliation and poisonous deceit.”
Echoing that long before even hearing it, Father MacRae wrote from his own prison cell his first of several articles about this story in defense of Cardinal Pell. He said he wonders today if Cardinal Pell was even aware of his first post about the state of Australian justice: “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial and So Is Australia.”
Today back in Rome, Cardinal Pell might understandably have every reason to want to distance himself from the grave injustice that befell him, and from the “accuse crisis” in the Church that ensnared him and paved the way for his wrongful conviction. In this, he was not alone. I don’t think there was anyone, except perhaps the Cardinal himself, who pondered and prayed over this injustice more than the wrongly imprisoned Fr Gordon MacRae. So what a shock it was to him when he learned that while in prison Cardinal George Pell had pondered his plight as well.
The following is an excerpt from Prison Journal Volume 2 by George Cardinal Pell (Ignatius Press, 2021):
From the prison cell of Cardinal Pell - Friday, 2 August 2019:
“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.
“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australian media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.
“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’ Fr MacRae recounts the extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windschuttle, editor of the quality journal, Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ [See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell.’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019].
"The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in April, 2015]. Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.
“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019.
“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.
“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.
“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from BTSW ‘About’],
‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’”
— George Cardinal Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 58-60
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Editor’s Note: Please share this important post from Ryan A. MacDonald. After the harsh condemnation Fr MacRae received from rCatholicism at Reddit, he and we were grateful to learn that a recent article from Beyond These Stone Walls received a commendation in the October 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The citation was for “exposing with clarity the double standard applied when priests are accused.” The article receiving the citation was: Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo
You may also like these other posts from Ryan A. MacDonald:
The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud
The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence
The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae
You may also wish to see our new feature on the BTSW Menu: Voices from Beyond.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Readers may recall that Father Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL, is the volunteer Canon Law advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls. He was also the subject of a post in July, 2021 entitled “Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests.” Father Stuart has since received the approval of his bishop to commence a doctoral degree program in Canon Law. We want to congratulate Father Stuart in this important development and the recognition of his expertise for which we hope to soon be a beneficiary. Please keep Father Stuart in prayer as he pursues this exhaustive program in addition to his parochial ministry.
Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?
Striking similarities exist between claims of Cardinal George Pell’s accuser and those in a discredited case hyped by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in Rolling Stone magazine.
Striking similarities exist between claims of Cardinal George Pell’s accuser and those in a discredited case hyped by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in Rolling Stone magazine.
Back in 2016, before the American presidential election that shook our politics, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was quoted in a NewsMax article entitled “Trump Taps into Mass Distrust.” Dr. Donohue, who happens to be a well-published sociologist, cited a poll by the Media Insight Project and the American Press Institute that measured the confidence voters have in American institutions.
Topping the list of those earning the public’s trust were, in order: The U.S. military, the scientific community, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized religion (yes, even still!), and America’s financial institutions. At the bottom of the list were the institutions Americans trust least. The last two came as no surprise. Only six percent of Americans reported having trust in the news media. Only four percent reported having trust in members of Congress.
Bill Donohue also cited another study. In 1985, a Pew Research Center poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans trust the news media to report facts truthfully. By 2011, that figure dropped to 25 percent. In the same poll in 1985, 45 percent of Americans thought the media was biased. By 2011, it jumped to 63 percent.
Bill Donohue gleaned from the fine print of these polls that the two most cited reasons for wide-spread mistrust of news media were inaccurate reporting and media bias. There is another reason, but it may not be so evident to casual consumers of the news. The media has abandoned skepticism in favor of quick and easy “gotcha” news.
The most articulate analysis of media bias comes from journalist JoAnn Wypijewski in a news-busting CounterPunch article about the Catholic priesthood scandal. Her against-the-tide article is “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film” (For full disclosure my own charges are examined therein).
“I don’t believe the personal injury lawyers … I don’t believe the prosecutors who pursued tainted cases, or the therapists who revived junk science or the juries that sided with them or the judges who failed to act justly or the people who made money off any of this …
“I don’t believe the claims of all who say they are victims or who prefer the tough-minded label, survivor — because ready belief is not part of a journalist’s mental kit, but also because what happened in 2002 makes it difficult to distinguish real claims from fraudulent or opportunistic ones without independent research.”
This article would never win recognition for public service from the news media because it goes so vividly against the current tide of political correctness. The news media has abandoned the necessary skepticism that was once “part of a journalist’s mental kit.” To be merely accused today is to be guilty.
Manipulating the Court of Public Opinion
This, says JoAnn Wypijewski, is “the legacy of the courtroom of panic that made ‘the pedophile priest’ a cultural bogeyman, a devil, who need not be real but only named to light the fires of wrath.” I became a target of that courtroom of panic and those fires of wrath, and so, it now seems, did Cardinal George Pell.
In a time of moral panic, convictions happen in the public eye long before they happen in a court of law. For many prosecutors, arriving at the truth is now less important than winning. The necessary “independent research” cited by Ms. Wypijewski happens only when the smoke of an unjust trial clears, if at all.
The case against Cardinal Pell had already raised concerns for real justice even before it ended in a courtroom. One of the best commentaries on this has come from David F. Pierre, Jr., host of The Media Report, in “The Witch Hunt Against Australia’s Cardinal George Pell: Five Facts You Need to Know.” The five facts summarized by David Pierre are these:
The Australian government began investigating Cardinal Pell over five years ago even though there had been no crime reported against him.
Pell’s publicly known accusers include career criminals, admitted drug addicts, and others who have lodged similar complaints before.
Even secular observers have admitted that Pell was not treated fairly.
Accusations against Pell were widely circulated in a 2017 book that has been thoroughly discredited.
Cardinal Pell vehemently and consistently denies the accusations against him.
Before the trial, some of the charges were withdrawn by prosecutors. Now there is a new source of grave doubt about the justice meted out to Cardinal Pell. An alert reader of These Stone Walls first spotted this story in an account at LifeSite News by Dorothy Cummings McLean entitled, “Cardinal Pell’s Accuser Copied Testimony from Old Rolling Stone Report, Journalist Claims.”
The writer who first uncovered this is Keith Windschuttle, an Australian journalist and historian. He used the professional skepticism and deep-sourcing that were once mainstays of the news media but have sadly been abandoned in favor of quick sound bites and the strip-mining of news.
Mr. Windschuttle discovered some eerie similarities between the claims brought against Cardinal Pell and a lurid story of abuse by American Catholic priests that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in 2011. His findings listed a series of identical, sometimes verbatim, allegations seemingly lifted from the pages of Rolling Stone.
The magazine and that article would have been readily available to Pell’s accuser when he first described his “abuse” to police in 2015. The LifeSite News summary of the article lists the similarities, and they leave little doubt, according to Windschuttle:
“What is the difference between this account of child sex abuse in a Catholic church in Philadelphia and the evidence given by a sole accuser in the Victorian [AU] court case that convicted Cardinal George Pell? … Not much. The two stories were so close to being identical that the likelihood of the Australian version being original is most implausible. There were too many similarities for the likeness to be dismissed as ‘coincidence.’”
Sabrina Rubin Erdely & the Predatory News Media
You may read for yourselves in the LifeSite News article the striking similarities that raise a specter of plagiarism in the charges against Cardinal Pell. The 2011 Rolling Stone article from which Pell’s accuser seems to have copied his claims was “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” written by a now disgraced and discredited former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
Readers may remember that name from “A Rape on Campus,” an explosive story in the November 2014 issue of Rolling Stone. Sabrina Rubin Erdely profiled the story of “Jackie,” a student at the University of Virginia who claimed to be a victim of gang rape at a UVA fraternity party in 2012. Rolling Stone’s front page cried out:
“A RAPE ON CAMPUS: Jackie was just starting her freshman year at the University of Virginia when she was brutally assaulted by seven men at a frat party. When she tried to hold them accountable, a whole new kind of abuse began.”
Erdely’s account depicted UVA administrators as having callous disregard for the pain and suffering of the anonymous “Jackie” and, by extension, for the plight of other victims of sexual assault on campus. The story helped launch a national debate about rape on college campuses across the nation.
It contributed to a moral panic that went all the way to the Obama White House where legislation was promoted to drastically curtail the due process rights of accused college students. In the fallout from the story, UVA administrators called for resignations and expulsions even before all the facts were in. Like most such media events, the story was accepted as Gospel truth once it appeared in print.
But then someone began to do some of the independent research that journalist JoAnn Wypijewski calls for above. “Jackie’s” account turned out to be a massive lie, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s coverage of it a massive betrayal of journalistic standards. No one could corroborate any of “Jackie’s” story and Erdely never even bothered to try. She did no fact checking. She just ran with the story, riding a wave of public hysteria about sexual assault and abuse.
A civil trial took place just before the 2016 presidential election. From the witness stand, Sabrina Rubin Erdely cited the same tactic that countless contingency lawyers have used against the Catholic Church: “It takes trauma victims some time to come forward with all the details,” she testified to excuse her disregard for journalistic standards.
“It is not unusual,” Erdely testified to explain away “Jackie’s” ever-changing details of her story. In the end, with streaming tears, Erdely blamed it all on “Jackie,” saying, “It was a mistake to rely on someone whose intent was to deceive me.”
The bar for proving defamation and negligence against a journalist is steep. A jury must conclude, as it did in this case, that a journalist or media venue published what it knew to be false, or did so with reckless disregard for truth. In the end, when the entire account was heard, a jury found Rolling Stone guilty of negligence and defamation, and imposed a $7.5 million dollar jury award to the falsely accused fraternity students.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely was found liable for actual malice in the writing and publication of this story. By the December 2016 edition of Rolling Stone, her name was removed from the masthead of contributing editors, and she disappeared from the world of journalism.
That Lying Scheming Altar Boy Again!
But there is another reason readers of these pages may recall Ms Erdely and Rolling Stone. A news media in pursuit of the whole truth instead of its own agenda would have scoured Ms Erdely’s previous work, but they did not. They did not because doing so would have required delving into another story by Ms Erdely that raises the same hard questions. It is a story that I have written about in multiple posts, including “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”
Three years before “A Rape on Campus,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone launched another moral panic by exploding a story of a Pennsylvania Catholic sex-abuse ring among priests in “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files.” It is a story, as I have written elsewhere in These Stone Walls, that turned Father Charles Engelhardt into a martyr and Daniel Gallagher into a millionaire.
And lest you have questions about media influence on judges, Father Engelhardt’s judge, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, objected to a defense question posed to jurors:
“Anybody that doesn’t think there is widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is living on another planet.”
Before falling for “Jackie’s” fraud, Ms. Erdely fell for a much larger one brought by Daniel Gallagher, assured anonymity by Ms. Erdely as “Billy Doe” in the pages of Rolling Stone. It is this story, and Rolling Stone’s presentation of it, that is now the apparent source of copycat testimony in the case against Cardinal George Pell.
But, like Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus,” this story was also a fraud. It was written with the same malice and disregard for truth as Erdely’s other story, but it nonetheless launched a witch hunt in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with tentacles extending into the present day. Now it seems that some of those tentacles washed up in Australia as well.
The facts in this story are staggering, and though I have written extensively of them, the best source for a succinct summary is by journalist Ralph Cipriano writing for the January-February issue of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst in “The Legacy of Billy Doe.”
It is ironic that Cardinal Pell’s accuser picked this story to serve as a model to concoct false charges. Of course, this happened long before the story of Daniel Gallagher was exposed as a fraud. Up until last year it was a great success for the newly minted millionaire, Daniel Gallagher, who is yet to be brought to justice because it would be greatly embarrassing for Pennsylvania justice officials to do so.
I highly recommend Ralph Cipriano’s “The Legacy of Billy Doe.” In only two pages, he blew apart the narrative that has prevailed in the media to date. It is a narrative that now raises questions about the character of the case against Cardinal Pell as well. We owe it to him to make this known. There is a reason why no other news media figure has taken up this story as Mr. Cipriano has, and as I have here at These Stone Walls.
And it is a frightening reason, frightening for anyone concerned with the integrity of our news media and the tyranny it can create through false witness. No one has articulated this better than The Wall Street Journal' s Pulitzer Prize-winning expositor of truth in justice, Dorothy Rabinowitz, in her 2005 book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times:
“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the progressive views held by many toward crimes involving special categories of victims like women and children. [T]here [is] a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse charges was to undermine the battle. It was to betray all other victims of sexual predators. Where advanced reasoning of this sort prevailed, the facts of a case were simply irrelevant.”
And that, my friends — for anyone who has counted on the news media to champion truth and justice — may be the cruelest tyranny of all.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please help share this story with others. I believe we owe that much to Cardinal Pell.
