Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2017

The Middle Aged Spectator considers Cardinal George Pell’s situation

Let’s begin by making clear that the MAS does not have any knowledge (apart from what has been made public through the media) of the charges Cardinal Pell faces with regard to child abuse. For many years the MAS was a Pell-apologist, and the reader will see why below, but in recent times that position has changed somewhat. Growing up in a Catholic family the MAS lived in St Alipius’ Parish, Ballarat East, from the beginning of his secondary schooling, and acted as an altar server to Father Pell in the early 1970s. At that time there were a number of priests living in the Ballarat East presbytery, and this is one fact often missed in the media coverage of the events that took place there around that time. Fr Pell was very much a junior priest then, despite his imposing physical size and intellect. Monsignor MacMahon was the Parish Priest, and also living there during that time were Fr O’Connell, Fr O’Toole, and Fr Gerald Ridsdale, who most readers of this will recognise as the