The Trial of Cardinal Becciu, the Betrayal of Cardinal Pell

Credits: Left, CNS; Right, CNS/Paul Haring

In December 2023 Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, the first prelate in history to face trial in a Vatican court, was convicted of embezzlement and money laundering.

January 10, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I recently explained to a friend concerned about the emergence of accounts of historic abuse by priests that mainstream media often save such stories to run them near Christmas and Easter. The motive of the left-leaning media in this seems obvious. It is to drive a wedge between Catholics and their Church. So it was doubly distressing when lurid stories of criminal behavior were generated from the highest levels of Church authority during the Advent and Christmas seasons this year.

“A Cardinal Once Seen as Future Pope Now Faces Prison.” That shocking headline was a front page story by Francis X. Rocca in the December 13, 2023 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, has stood accused by Vatican investigators of the crimes of embezzlement and money laundering since 2020. Trial for the then 75-year-old prelate commenced in 2021. In the weeks before Christmas in 2023, he was convicted of the charges and sentenced to a prison term of five-and-a-half years.

Cardinal Becciu is the first cardinal in Church history to face criminal charges in a Vatican court. According to the Rocca article, five others also faced criminal charges in the same case. They included other Vatican officials and outsiders. The case centered on a failed Vatican investment in a high-end London property and “the alleged theft of money intended to free a kidnapped nun but reportedly spent instead on resort vacations and luxury goods from Prada and Louis Vuitton,” according to Rocca. This story could not be worse.

The trial, which concluded near Christmas, included “accusations of Vatican vendettas as well as Becciu’s secretly recorded conversation with the pope.” Mr. Rocca reported that Pope Francis changed Church laws during the investigation in ways that defendants’ lawyers said favored the prosecution and violated the right to a fair trial — “including a broader authority to eavesdrop on suspects.”

Prior to his role as prefect for the Vatican office, Cardinal Becciu had been in the official role of “Substitute for General Affairs.” Mr. Rocca described this role as “effectively the pope’s chief of staff.” Becciu served in this capacity for the last two years of the pontificate of Benedict XVI and at least the first five years of the papacy of Francis. Becciu described this role, reported by journalist Francis X. Rocca, in 2018: “The substitute is, so to speak, the one who has no time for himself but must give it first to the Holy Father and therefore be willing to take any of his calls and favor any of his initiatives.”

It was Francis who elevated Becciu to the rank of cardinal and appointed him to his role overseeing the canonization of Saints. When the charges of money laundering and embezzlement emerged in 2020, Pope Francis asked him to resign.

Cardinal Becciu, Pope Francis, Cardinal Pell [Credits: CNS/Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters, CBCEW, Daniel Ibanez/CNA/EWTN]

Who’s Left on the Side of Right?

Several biographies of Pope Francis point to Vatican corruption as a primary impetus for his elevation to the papacy in the conclave of 2013. In my post, “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy,” I described the conditions under which Benedict XVI shocked the world with his decision to step down from the Chair of Peter. His final year was marred by Vatican corruption, especially revolving around Vatican finances. The betrayals and political machinations in Rome became legendary.

The word, “machination” refers to a crafty scheme or cunning design for the accomplishment of a sinister end. There were several such schemes at work in the background that caused Benedict XVI to conclude, as he did in his February 2013 announcement, that he must step down:

“I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

In the years to follow the 2013 conclave, one scandal after another emerged from Rome. Writing for The New York Times in 2018, conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat wrote of the “latest bomb” to go off in “an already cratered Catholic landscape.” The bomb then was an 11-page “testimony” from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States, accusing Pope Francis of shielding and enabling a serial abuser, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, by releasing him from restrictions on his activities and travel.

The restrictions had been imposed by Benedict XVI in the wake of revelations that McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians for years. Cardinal McCarrick had been restricted by Benedict to a life of prayer and penance, but ignored it. According to columnist Robert George writing in The Washington Post in 2018, “Pope Francis ignored it as well.”

Ross Douthat attributed this decision of Francis to the fact that he “needed allies” in the ongoing struggle between conservative and liberal Catholics. This is a scandal of its own. Douthat reported that McCarrick “was sympathetic to the Pope’s planned liberalizing push.” The irony was that liberal Catholics, the very ones who championed full exposure of the sexual abuse crisis, were willing to look the other way when Francis promoted McCarrick, removed his disciplinary sanctions, and corralled his help for an obsessive agenda to thwart Catholic conservatives. Some have suggested that such obsessive concerns helped to keep rogue Vatican actors like Cardinal Becciu from scrutiny. When the spotlight of obsession is on sexual abuse alone, money flows freely in the surrounding darkness.

When Cardinal Pell Was Accused

The case against Cardinal George Pell was also 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 US grand jury reports on Catholic clergy.

In his analysis of the Cardinal Becciu trial in The Wall Street Journal cited above, Francis X. Rocca included the following paragraph:

“Around that time, 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 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 canceled. 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, I 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.”

Book cover image courtesy of Ignatius Press; Red cardinal photo by RachidH (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

Many Unanswered Questions

In Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal Volume 2, in an entry dated 2 August 2018, he devoted several pages to an article of mine, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” The article had been sent to him in prison by Sheryl Collmer, a columnist for Crisis magazine. (The full excerpt now appears at our “Voices from Beyond” feature. )

My article drew a parallel between an accuser’s testimony in the trial of Cardinal Pell and that of another accuser in an unrelated case reported in Rolling Stone magazine by a now disgraced reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. It turned out that there was indeed a connection, and the Erdely article was widely read in Australia before Pell was accused. As Francis X. Rocca observed in The Wall Street Journal excerpt above, “Pell considered Becciu his main opponent.” Is there something further to be deduced from this? Consider this 2020 entry from the Australia site Wrongful Convictions Report — “Cardinal Pell ... well, well, well”:

“Italian media have reported that Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, 72, is suspected of wiring 700,000 euros to recipients in Australia who helped to ensure hostile testimony in the trial of Cardinal George Pell, who was accused of molesting choir boys in Melbourne in the 1990s. Becciu, days after being sacked by the Pope, denies the truth of the reports.”

Consider also these further entries in Cardinal Pell’s Journal written from his prison cell:

• Friday, 2 August 2019: “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 was also a fantasy or a fiction. I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause.”

• Sunday, 27 October 2019: “I finished reading a collection of articles from 23 October 2019 on the Vatican finance scandals ... [One] article mentioned Msgr Cesare Burgazzi, who worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State on the finances who became disillusioned by his discovery of a parallel bank, another IOR, and was then removed from his position through media accusations of sexual behavior which were later shown to be completely baseless. I had not heard of this.” [Emphasis added].

• Thursday, 14 November 2019: “So far, the Vatican financial scandals have not bitten as deeply, especially in Australia, but they are a scandal of incompetence exploited by criminals.... Becciu had given an interview to a journalist as he was under pressure, which is not surprising.”

• Thursday, 28 November 2019: “Cardinal Becciu furiously denounced as ‘another false article’ Ed Condon’s accurate account on the London property fiasco and of the accounting procedures which attempted to conceal it.” [Footnote: Ed Condon, “Vatican Officials: Swiss Bank Suspected of Money Laundering led to Pell Conflict,” Catholic World Report, 21 November 2019.]

• Saturday, 30 November 2019: “I am becoming more interested in trying to put together the early stages in the evolution of the charges against me. Why were the charges first ascribed to 1997 instead of 1996? When was Sunday Mass introduced as a setting for the crime? Who helped the complainant? When did the similarities with the [Rolling Stone’s] Billy Doe incidents in Philadelphia emerge?”

Cardinal Pell’s last question now haunts this story: “Is there a Rome connection?”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: I continue to feel an obligation to the late Cardinal Pell to uncover the truth of this story whenever and wherever possible. Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Excerpt: From the Prison Journal of Cardinal Pell, 2 August 2019

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's Rolling Stone

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

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.”

Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Paul Haring | CNS

In strange ways, injustices I have known as a prisoner and a priest intersected the lives of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell who died just ten days apart.

February 8 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pope Benedict XVI passed from this life at age 95 on the final day of 2022. Ten days later, Cardinal George Pell died of cardiac arrest at age 81 while recovering from routine surgery at a hospital in Rome. Both of these men were giants in the Church as the many tributes to them from around the world make clear. They were also targets for much vitriol and injustice. It was in this targeted injustice that my path crossed with that of both men.

In “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae,” a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by famed Boston criminal defense and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, he cited a ground-breaking book by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board entitled, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness, and Other, Terrors of Our Time. Ms. Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of writings about unjust sex abuse prosecutions that generated a spate of wrongful convictions of innocent people in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of her subjects in the book and subsequent writings spent decades in prison. I am one of them.

One of the tragically misguided prosecutions cited in the book is that of Margaret Kelly Michaels, then a 24-year-old nursery school teacher in New Jersey. Charged with multiple counts of child molestation in a witch hunt atmosphere, Kelly was innocent of the heinous crimes, none of which actually took place. The charges were fantastical and false, but the child abuse terror of the time resulted in easy convictions with no valid evidence.

The nature of the evidence in Kelly’s case was chilling. The prosecution’s child psych expert — who had no real expertise at all — fashioned a theory that young children who say that no sexual abuse happened actually mean the opposite. A vigilante jury bought that theory and convicted Kelly Michaels. At age 24, she was sentenced to 47 years in prison.

After failed appeals having nothing whatsoever to do with truth or justice, Kelly’s fate seemed sealed in wrongful imprisonment until Dorothy Rabinowitz began writing about it. Then New York civil rights attorney Morton Stavis came out of retirement to take the case pro bono. In her book, Ms. Rabinowitz revealed that Mr. Stavis sought the aid of a New York-based left-leaning legal think tank, the Center for Constitutional Rights that he himself founded. The CCR wanted nothing to do with this case. As Ms. Rabinowitz explained:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the politically progressive views held by many at the center. In the 1980s, as today, there was a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse was to undermine the battle against child abuse. It was to betray children and other victims of sexual predators.”

No Crueler Tyrannies, 17-18

The charges against me stem from the same time period, filtered through the same progressive political opinions, and hyped by the same prosecutorial mindset that to be accused of such things is to be guilty. It is the cruelest of tyrannies that even our Catholic bishops have cowed in fear under that progressive steamroller as priests so accused are discarded without defense. This was articulated in my recent post, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”

The heroic attorney Morton Stavis was not defeated by the progressive disdain for his effort from his own tribe at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He did not live to see his victory in this case, but he had put together a small team of righteous defenders who eventually prevailed by exposing the truth and winning Kelly’s freedom. One of these defenders was Robert Rosenthal whose prior legal briefs on my behalf are still on display at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

Kelly Michaels went on in life to marry a judge. She eventually recovered — to the extent one can — from the tyranny of wrongful imprisonment. She has corresponded with me in freedom, imparting as much hope for justice as she can by urging me to never give up. I haven’t, but I will be 70 on my next birthday and like Job, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25).

Vincenzo Pinto | AFP

Benedict’s “Crimes against Humanity”

However, reading Dorothy’s book was unfortunately not my final encounter with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Clinging to the progressive view that to be accused of sexual abuse is to be guilty, the Center for Constitutional Rights allowed itself to be duped and used by SNAP, the activist group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. I wrote a post some time ago that seemed to mark the beginning of the end of this organization's campaign to destroy any due process for Catholic priests. The post was, “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

Prior to writing that post, David Clohessy and SNAP manipulated the Center for Constitutional Rights into bringing a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican at the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. It was a shameless publicity stunt that had no hope of success, but was filed only to shame Pope Benedict and bring attention to SNAP.

Though I was aware of the charge, it was only after the International Criminal Court dismissed it that I learned that I was an unwitting pawn in this debacle. Journalist Joann Wypijewski, a reporter of courage and high integrity, wrote of it in her blistering review of the movie “Spotlight,” a film about The Boston Globe Spotlight Team coverage of the sexual abuse scandal. The following is an excerpt of her bold article, “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film”:

“The film’s advertisement for SNAP, the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, faithfully represents the Globe’s affiliation. It elides SNAP’s belief that wrongful prosecutions are a minor price to pay in pursuit of its larger mission, something [The Boston Globe] did not much concern itself with either as it collected its Pulitzer for service in the public interest; something even the Center for Constitutional Rights disregarded in 2011 when it joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity.

“Liberals who cheer this sort of thing ought to ponder whether they have any principles at all ... . The CCR brief failed ... but to CCR’s shame, Father MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief, with respect to allegations of videotape (that is, child porn), which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”

I was frozen in place by grief upon first learning of this. I knew that the charge had no substance. I also knew that in her WSJ investigation, Dorothy Rabinowitz confronted NH Detective James McLaughlin who first contrived the charge. Cornered, he finally admitted, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

This did not stop SNAP and CCR from including it in a falsified brief before the International Criminal Court. There was no repercussion for the attempt at fraud upon the court. Even now, as recently as a few months ago, biased NH reporter Damien Fisher— whose wife Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher has ties to my diocese — repeated the pornography allegation without even mentioning that it had been widely discredited, including by the dishonest detective who first raised it.

All the claims that Pope Benedict XVI enabled accused priests and failed to protect victims are of a kind with the above story. In the end, it was never any of this that really made him a target. It was his orthodoxy, his fidelity, his clear-minded exposure of Catholic truths. None of this could ever successfully be assailed, so instead they smeared him with a weapon straight from hell: false witness. Let that sink in.

The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

In the same manner that Kelly Michaels reached out to me upon her exoneration, it was because I had been so falsely accused that I reached out to Cardinal George Pell during his 400 days of unjust imprisonment. Having come to recognize signposts of dishonesty in such a case, I was certain that Cardinal Pell had been falsely accused. But because of prison rules barring direct contact with other prisoners, I could not contact in prison directly.

A friend, Sheryl Collmer, a Tyler, Texas writer for Crisis Magazine and other venues, was my intermediary. I know that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in this case it was perhaps a bit less deadly. There have been few really proud moments during my imprisonment, but my ability to detect and expose the truth in support of Cardinal Pell was one of them.

As a result, I found this excerpt in his published Prison Journal Volume 2 (Ignatius Press 2021). It was written from his prison cell:

“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 Australia media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, 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 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 Windshuttle, 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 Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in 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 the BTSW About Page], ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice]’”

Addendum

You may see — from Cardinal Pell’s last citation above — where Dorothy Rabinowitz got the inspiration for the title of her book, No Crueler Tyrannies. Once free from his wrongful prison sentence, Cardinal Pell was restored to his rightful position in Rome. From there, he reached out to me again in ways that I only learned about posthumously. He wrote to a mutual friend that he plans to refer to my situation in talks he is slated to present in Rome and Australia. He never got to present them.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Cardinal George Pell Faced Down a Hostile World” (January 13, 2023), Fr Raymond de Souza wrote that “His faith even during wrongful detention, was the crown of an inspiring Catholic life.” Reading his Prison Journal, I have no doubt been so inspired.

It is my prayer, and perhaps not even a necessary one, that Pope Benedict and Cardinal Pell both now stand in the Presence of God where they behold the fruition of all the graces bestowed upon them, and hopefully now upon us through them. We have not heard the last of them.

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Note from Fr. Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

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Francesco Sforza | Osservatore Romano | AFP

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanow. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

A 2016 Newsweek cover story by Ralph Cipriano exposed how a Catholic sex abuse fraud made Fr Charles Engelhardt a martyr, and con man Daniel Gallagher a millionaire.

November 14, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: It is very rare that we have two posts in a week. I first wrote this story in 2016. Fr. Charles Engelhardt died chained to a Pennsylvania prison medical unit gurney on November 15, 2014. I wanted to honor him with the truth, but in the years since this post was first written, so much more of this truth has come to light. In the time since his death, his Philadelphia prosecutor, Seth Williams, was the subject of a 23-count federal indictment for fraud, bribery and other charges. He took a plea deal and went to federal prison. Fr. Charles Engelhardt refused a plea deal and died in prison.

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This post has a most urgent preface, one that arrived in the mail just as I sat down to type. It was a single page sent to me by BTSW reader Helen, a frequent commenter from Pennsylvania who wrote across the top of the page, “Father Gordon, your face could be on this print.” No, Helen, it could not! The face on that printed page is someone I once met at a pivotal time in my life as a priest, but the sender could not have known that. Helen simply stumbled upon a quote she thought I ought to see, and she was right. The face and the quote on that page belong to the late Father John Hardon, SJ (1914–2000), an American Jesuit priest whose cause for beatification has begun with a recognition in Rome that he is held to be a Servant of God.

Father Hardon and I met in 1989 by “coincidence,” if you still believe in such things. I don’t, but how and why we met is another post for another day. Suffice it for now to say that it was an encounter I could not forget, and when I saw his face on that printed page, and read the words attributed to him, it seemed as though he once again stood next to me with a firm grip upon my shoulder. The quote expresses perfectly why I must write this post, why you must read it, and why together we must share it boldly, and as far and wide as we can make it travel. I took Father Hardon’s words to be a directive, and so should you. Here is the quote:

“Our duty as Catholics is to know the truth; to live the truth; to defend the truth; to share the truth with others; and to suffer for the truth.”

— Father John Hardon

I have long hoped, during the years of media coverage of Catholic scandal, that someone else in the news media might join the ranks of Dorothy Rabinowitz among journalists with a spinal column. It seems I had overlooked Ralph Cipriano. For some time now, he has been covering events in Philadelphia for BigTrial.net, his outstanding Philadelphia Trial Blog. Some time ago, Mr. Cipriano published a major media event in a Newsweek cover story entitled “Catholic Guilt? The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case” (Jan. 20, 2016).

This is a dark story, and a painful one, and for any number of reasons you might be tempted to click it away at this point, please don’t, for it became a matter not only of justice, but of life and death. Ralph Cipriano’s Newsweek article arrived in my mail on the same day as the above quote from Servant of God, Father John Hardon, and I knew instantly that I had to write about this.

Reading through the Newsweek piece was a vivid experience of déjà vu because I have written of some aspects of this story in a post entitled, “The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone.” It was an account of how a good, kind and much loved Pennsylvania priest, Father Charles Engelhardt, was martyred in prison as a result of greed, false witness and prosecutor misconduct. It is this same story that Ralph Cipriano covered in Newsweek, and both are to be commended for some courageous against-the-tide reporting. The Church and priesthood are indebted to Newsweek for presenting this story so boldly in a leading secular media venue while so much of the Catholic press crossed to the other side on the road to Jericho.

Father Charles Engelhardt died in a prison medical unit on November 15, 2014, and the full telling of this story is all that will bring meaning and purpose to his death.

So be brave, please, and read this post to the end, then share it every way you can. Do this, please, to honor the Servant of God who just told us that our duty as Catholics is to know, defend, and share the truth. Do this, please, to honor Father Charles Engelhardt who suffered for the truth and for his priesthood, a suffering that cost him his life.

Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Facts, Just Dirt

I’d like to think that I have approached this story as Ralph Cipriano did, with cool journalistic detachment, but I now admit that’s very hard to do when the story has a Kafkaesque ring that is all too familiar to me. I was admittedly angry and not at all detached when I wrote the heading for this section, “A Rolling Stone Gathers No Facts, Just Dirt,” a fact conveyed in my Search Engine summary for the post linked in the section above:

“A federal jury found Rolling Stone liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice, but their earlier malice cost the life of an innocent priest.”

Today, I find myself no less angry revisiting it. It told the tale of how Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s infamous November 19, 2014 Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus” came unraveled as her account of serial rape at the University of Virginia was debunked and widely exposed as grossly inaccurate and misinformed. Ms. Erdely fell for the story of “Jackie,” took it at face value, and ran with it — doing much damage not only to UVA and its students, but to the field of journalism itself.

Since I first wrote of this, the University of Virginia and its Phi Kappa Psi fraternity have filed multi-million dollar libel and slander lawsuits naming Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine as defendants. Both have since suffered serious losses in journalistic credibility. Rolling Stone magazine has since retracted Ms. Erdely’s account of a lurid frat house serial rape case at UVA. Her Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus,” is today widely seen as grossly irresponsible and agenda-driven slander masked as journalism.

However, Mr. Cipriano’s bold Newsweek cover story is the first hint of media clamor to revisit Ms. Erdely’s other Rolling Stone fraud, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” in which she introduced “Billy Doe,” a purported victim of violent and horrific sexual abuse by several Pennsylvania Catholic priests. Billy Doe, granted anonymity by Rolling Stone and everyone else in the news media, was described by Ms. Erdely as “a sweet, gentle kid with boyish good looks” who had been callously “passed around” from predator to predator in the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The story eventually resulted in $5 million in settlements for Billy Doe while landing three innocent Catholic priests in prison.

One of those priests was Father Charles Engelhardt whose decision to stand by the truth against Billy Doe’s $5 million fraud cost this good priest his life. As journalist Ralph Cipriano reveals in Newsweek, Father Engelhardt refused pre-trial plea deals including one deal on the eve of trial that would have resulted in no time in prison and a sentence of simple “community service.” Father Engelhardt chose the truth, and he chose to suffer for the truth. He instead was sentenced to a term of six to twelve years in prison “because he would not perjure himself by pleading guilty ‘to make a deal,’ to admit to a crime he did not commit.” In “Handcuffs and a Hospital Bed,” a November 17, 2014 posting at his “Big Trial” blog, Cipriano wrote:

“For Father Charles Engelhardt, the ordeal is finally over. The 67-year-old priest died at 8:30 PM Saturday night [November 15, 2014] an inmate at the State Correctional Institution in Coal Township [PA] where he served nearly two years of a 6-to-12 year sentence.”

Daniel Gallagher after his $5 million fraud took the life of Father Charles Engelhardt.

Daniel in the Liars’ Den

The man dubbed “Billy Doe” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine — while shielding his true identity and character from view in all this — is Daniel Gallagher. Today he is a free man living in Florida where he settled into a lifestyle bankrolled by $5 million in settlements from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and, in part, its insurers. Gallagher lives free from scrutiny and the long arm of the law because the DA, judge, and news media in Philadelphia all got behind this case, but remain unable to surrender enough of their hubris to stop covering for him, to admit to their pursuit of “trophy justice,” and to allow the facts to invade their field of vision. Sometimes the meting out of justice comes down, not to facts, but to mere ego.

In his riveting Newsweek article, and in “Newsweek’s Cover Boy Makes a Media Splash” on his BigTrial.net blog (Jan. 28, 2016) Ralph Cipriano pursued the truth about who and what Daniel Gallagher is. From his claims of serial victimhood to his ever changing accounts of abuse, to his vague and amorphous facts and stories, to his most recent (and most troubling) psychiatric profile, Daniel Gallagher is exposed as

“chronically maladjusted, immature, self-indulgent, manipulating others to his own ends, refusing to accept responsibility for his own problems, exaggerating, grandiose, hedonistic, impulsive, manipulative and self-serving, paranoid, delusional…”

And the list doesn’t stop there. Gallagher pulled off a con man’s dream when he got a DA and judge to agree that his 23 failed stints in drug treatment were all someone else’s fault. In a Linkedin article, “A Weapon of Mass Destruction,” I quoted a prison inmate who reacted to the flood of decades-old claims against priests with a dose of brutal self-honesty about his own proclivities and enablers:

“So let me get this straight. If I say that some priest touched me funny all those years ago, I’ll be seen as a victim, I’ll be paid for it, and my life will be his fault instead of mine? Do you have any idea how tempting this is?”

— A prison inmate

Daniel Gallagher’s claim of having passed polygraph tests also now appears to be no more truthful than his claim of being passed from priest to priest. No one but his contingency lawyer claims to have seen polygraph results, and efforts to obtain them have been met with silence. Meanwhile, Father Charles Engelhardt DID take polygraph tests, and passed them conclusively, as did other priests in Daniel Gallagher/Billy Doe’s sights. (And for what it is worth, so did I).

Readers of Beyond These Stone Walls should find a loud and clear ring of the familiar in all this. Everything now said of Daniel Gallagher in these reports has been said of Thomas Grover, my accuser trial. And it has all been said of Shamont Lyle Sapp, a con man who landed settlements from accusing four priests in four different states until he was exposed by a U.S. attorney and a journalist with integrity. I take no credit, but he was also exposed by me in my Linkedin article cited above.

This particular rolling stone about Daniel Gallagher and Father Charles Engelhardt, was sent downhill by Sabrina Rubin Erdely who has since been found liable for “actual malice” and “disregard for truth” by a judge in the University of Virginia story. The rolling stone about Father Engelhardt had a long path. It rolled all the way Down Under to Australia where elements of the story were duplicated and reused by prosecutors and the media in Australia to condemn an even greater trophy, Cardinal George Pell. I wrote of the glaring similarities in the two cases in “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” It turned out that indeed he was, and Australia’s highest court exonerated him after 400 days in prison.

Thanks to Ralph Cipriano and Newsweek magazine, some honest media has taken notice of the Daniel Gallagher scam, but not in time to save the life of Father Charles Engelhardt. Still, these revelations of truth bring immense comfort to those still charged with clearing this good priest’s good name. But there’s more than that at stake here. You have been duped. Our Church has been duped, and cast aside in the public square in the process. The truth is a value in its own right, and we owe it to ourselves to learn it and share it.

I can only thank Ralph Cipriano and Newsweek for taking this on, and for telling a truth most in the news media have shunned. Take a little time, please, and read the Newsweek article and Mr. Cipriano’s BigTrial.net blog, and share a link to this post with others. I know one Servant of God who will smile upon you for it.

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Covering unrelated stories of the trial of the late Cardinal George Pell and the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, Miranda Devine deserves a Pulitzer for journalistic integrity.

May 25, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I never imagined that I would be writing a post with Cardinal George Pell and Hunter Biden’s notorious “Laptop from Hell ” sharing the same title. The connections are circumstantial, but once I stumbled upon them, I knew I had my title for this post.

In both stories, the mainstream news media brought little light, but lots of heat, while exposing little truth beyond its own vile bias. In the case of Cardinal Pell’s unjust imprisonment, much of the news media in both Australia and America embraced a wildly imaginative narrative filled with holes to presume his guilt with no evidence. Being sent to prison is by no means an indication of guilt. In the case of Hunter Biden, both mainstream media and social media teamed up to cover up the explosive story before the 2020 presidential election. It was a true account that citizens of a free and open society had a right to know.

In both stories, one journalist distinguished herself as a champion of journalistic courage and integrity for pursuing and publishing the truth despite immense pressure to adhere to the media’s availability bias. That journalist is Miranda Devine who covered the Pell case in Australia while single-handedly exposing the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post.

Back in October, 2021, Ryan MacDonald wrote a post in these pages entitled, “Fr. Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell.” Ryan included in that post several pages from Cardinal Pell’s book, Prison Journal Volume 2 which was widely read across the globe.

The paragraphs that Ryan reprinted from the book were about me. I read them repeatedly, not because I like to see my name in print, but because I had a subconscious nagging sense that I was missing something. Then, just weeks ago, it struck me. In one paragraph, my name appears along with that of Miranda Devine. Why would that be important? It wasn’t at first, but in subsequent readings it leapt out at me. Here’s the story:

From the Cardinal Pell Journal

On May 15, 2019, three years to the day before typing this post, I published a carefully researched article entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Sheryl Collmer, a reader of this blog from Texas who writes for American Thinker and Catholic World Report, mailed a copy of my article to Cardinal Pell, then still in an Australian prison having lost his first appeal. From half a world away, Cardinal Pell pondered my article and then wrote about it on August 2, 2019 in the journal he kept in his cell. Here are excerpts:

“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 and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around 15 to 20 years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.”

Cardinal Pell went on in his journal to analyze my article and why I believed his trial was scripted from another unrelated case in the United States. A sensational and distorted account of that case appeared in both the U.S. and Australia in Rolling Stone magazine by a now disgraced former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. In several paragraphs, Cardinal Pell described my 2019 article:

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine Rolling Stone, pointing out that there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence. 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 Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“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.”

Cardinal George Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2 : pp 57-60

Cardinal Pell did not know it at the time, but I had already posted articles on the story of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s dubious article about accusations against Philadelphia priests by the anonymous “Billy Doe” in 2011, and her equally dubious account of gang rape at the University of Virginia. The most recent of my articles was, “The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone.”

Now Comes Miranda Devine

After reading Cardinal Pell’s book, I set it aside happy to have been of some hope and encouragement during his unjust time of imprisonment. Cardinal Pell concluded in his journal:

“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.”

Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 60

Many months after reading Cardinal Pell’s journal, I took up another book ordered for me by a friend. It was Laptop from Hell (Post Hill Press 2021), a now notorious account by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. My friend told me that the first printing sold out within weeks at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble so it was placed on backorder for me. It arrived in early March, 2022 and I began to read its shocking pages.

I immediately recognized its author, Miranda Devine, as the now famous New York Post columnist who nearly upended the U.S. presidential election in 2020. But I also knew that I had seen her name somewhere else. It turned out that it was in that passage from Cardinal Pell above. I was surprised to see both my name and that of Miranda Devine in the same paragraph.

I had not known until then that Ms. Devine wrote boldly in defense of Cardinal Pell against a tidal wave of progressive criticism in both Australia and the United States. Among her several articles on the Pell case was her last one, “Finally, Justice for George Cardinal Pell” published in the New York Post on April 7, 2020. Three weeks later I published, “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

There were several articles in the left-leaning Australian news media deeply critical of Ms. Miranda Devine for her defense of Cardinal Pell. She thus became, in my view, a champion of journalistic integrity. Such champions are few and far between now, but they keep alive the notion that fair, just, and courageous journalism is all that stands between us and the demise of democracy.

In the Bill of Rights, Freedom of the Press has long been regarded as fundamental to individual rights. Without a free media, a free society and democratic self-government would not be possible. Nonetheless, in October 2020, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and almost all network news media and social media banded together with an unprecedented decision to keep the American people from learning the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the presidential election.

I was in shock by this at the time. It was the sort of thing that happens during elections in any number of banana republics, but here it was, in a full court press, shamefully happening in the United States. As a result, the New York Post’ s Facebook and Twitter accounts were blocked and any mention of the laptop or its contents by thousands of users (including me) was censored.

Laptop from Hell got its title from a Twitter message of then President Donald Trump who read of some of its contents in the New York Post, the sole U.S. media outlet with the integrity to publish the story. Then President Trump’s Twitter account was also suspended.

I followed this story closely in October, 2020 as it was shamelessly suppressed and censored by most U.S. news and social media. The more it was suppressed, the more alarmed I became. As a 19-year-old in 1972, I was riveted to the Watergate story and the heroism of the Washington Post coverage by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The story led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and criminal charges for some senior White House staff. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for it while the names “Woodward and Bernstein” became synonymous with journalistic courage and integrity.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Now, a half century later, the same Washington Post was actively suppressing a story of government corruption of equal importance solely for political bias. The pre-election weeks of October 2020 should have caused an uproar over the revelations by Miranda Devine in the New York Post about the explosive contents of a laptop abandoned in a repair shop by the Democratic presidential nominee’s son and never retrieved. The White House and Democratic Party went into circle-the-wagons mode, and most of the news media, setting aside their primary role to be a nonpartisan check and balance on government, joined them there.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was not the only thing abandoned. Its potential impact before a hotly contested election resulted in the abandonment of the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press as well. Polls about trust and confidence in the news media were off the charts after Watergate, but reached an all-time low even before “Huntergate” when they bottomed out completely. In the most recent Pew Research Center survey of news journalists, in which I was invited to take part, American trust and confidence in the news media is under six percent.

The story told by Miranda Devine in Laptop from Hell is both utterly painful and painfully necessary. A web of lies, cover-ups and corruption drove Richard Nixon from the White House in his second term in 1974, but by covering up the Hunter Biden story in 2020, the news media interfered in a presidential election and now leaves a stunned nation with a scandal of equal measure after just one year of the Biden administration. It was not patriotism that did this. It was the opposite of patriotism. It was partisanship.

The laptop consists of thousands of emails, video clips, and other material produced by Hunter Biden, son of then Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic Nominee. The contents reveal a shocking influence-peddling scheme by Hunter Biden who received millions of dollars for arranging influence from his then Vice President father with foreign entities in Ukraine, Russia, and China.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Legislative Judiciary Committee Member Adam Schiff, and seemingly every member on the Democratic sides of the House and Senate who were asked, including fifty former intelligence officers sworn to uphold the Constitution, all agreed to knowingly propagate a massive lie: that the laptop story “had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.”

That well-rehearsed lie was repeated to the American people by the Democratic nominee as he stared into the camera during the second Presidential Debate. It should be alarming that it was President Trump, and not the news media moderator, who brought it up in the first place.

I waded into this story a bit when I posted “A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War” some months ago. It was posted just as Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine was in its early stages. I wrote in that post that if the slowly published contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop are true, the President is compromised in foreign policy regarding Russia, Ukraine and China. I was certainly not the first or the last to raise this concern. The best coverage came from the least impaired news media, The Epoch Times, and a March 23, 2022 op-ed by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke, “The Foreign Policy Ramifications of Hunter’s Emails.”

We only know about this story at all today thanks to the dogged pursuit of it by Miranda Devine and the New York Post. And in U.S. news coverage of the wrongly convicted and imprisoned George Cardinal Pell, Miranda Devine and the New York Post were singular in their expression of journalistic skepticism about the flawed case against him. Mercifully, all seven members of Australia’s High Court agreed. If there is a Pulitzer for journalistic courage and integrity, it should have Miranda Devine’s name on it.

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Note from the Editor: Please share this post. Father Gordon MacRae will mark forty years of priesthood on June 5, 2022, the Solemnity of Pentecost. Please join us here next week on June 1st for a special post as he reflects on those years in the most extraordinary circumstances. You may also like these related posts:

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

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.

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.”

— No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 17-18

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.