A WRONGFUL CONVICTION

A WRONGFUL CONVICTION :

GEORGE CARDINAL PELL  - An Innocent Man

                                                  Author : Jorathe Nắng Tím

                                           Translator : A.Prisca

Cardinal George Pell has been freed from prison after Australia's High Court, a full bench of 07 judges, ruled unanimously in Cardinal Pell’s favor, found the jury had not properly considered all the evidence presented at the trial and overturned his conviction on five counts of historical child sex abuse in Brisbane at 10:02 April 7, 2020: He has consistently innocent ! Cardinal Pell, 78, was serving a six-year jail sentence after he was convicted in 2018 of abusing two choirboys in the priests’ sacristy after Mass in Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Catheral in the 1990s  while he was Archbishop of Melbourne.

Pell was the most high-ranking figure in the Catholic Church to be jailed as part of a wave of court cases around the world against priests alleged to have committed serious sexual misconduct. The quashing of Cardinal Pell’s guilty verdict really brings the relief to the Vatican and the joy for the Universal Church, especially for Australia, where it seems that we cannot find the voice of justice for an innocent person in such a modern time.

Actually, the wrongful convictions are not the things that seldomly happen in the society because of different causes, but above all, they come from the limitations of human beings in terms of some limits of kindness, some limits of the purity of conscience, and and some lacks of the pure of heart, the benevolence and the generosity.

Like Cardinal George Pell, over 2000 years ago, Jesus was also in the list of poor victims who were sentenced to death despite of His innocence. The proof was that Governor Pontius Pilate, the only one who had the authority for the death sentence, in front of the Jews, the chief priests and the Pharisees shouting out loud “Let him be crucified!”, publicly said : “I find no guilt in him” (Jn 18,38). However, under the increasing pressure of the ones who tried to kill Jesus, Pilate once more went out and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you, so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” (Jn 19,4). Finally, being suppressed by the crowds when the chief priests and the guards saw Jesus, crying out, “Crucify him, crucify him!”, Pilate, though finding no guilt in Jesus, cowardly said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him.” (Jn 19,6) Likewise, for the past few years, although most of people have found out George Pell was not guilty and a lot of supporters had long argued that he was not guilty, the voice of justice has been too weak and low to overcome the pressure coming from the accusation of various social classes.     

The most cruel absurdity of the two situations of Jesus and Pell is in that people try to accuse them of what they never have any intention to do. When Jesus taught them to do : “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”, he was accused of “misleading [his] people; [opposing] the payment of taxes to Caesar and maintaining that he is the Messiah, a king.” (Lk 23,2) In the same way, Cardinal Pell was accused of child sexual abuse when he has made stand against same-sex marriage.  Additionally, people apply the common merely stupid and amateurish strategy to judge and accuse innocent people. We can find in the situation of Jesus, when asked “What charge do you bring [against] this man?” (Jn 18,29), the crow answered “If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” (Jn 18, 30). It is not far from the way Cardinal Pell was accused of child molestation, right in the priests’ sacristy after Mass around the crowd going just nearby, with the only argument : the altar boy said that !

The Way of the Cross or The Passion in the modern society with a lot of violence to accuse innocent people, to judge righteous people, and to break the scale of justice has always welcomed the lowly, the poor, the kind, the merciful, the righteous as the disciples and followers of Jesus, who willingly embrace the final sentence as Jesus “Lamb of God, taking away the sins of the world”.

In unity with the joy of the Universal Church on this event, we offer God great thanks and continue our praying for the other similar disciples, who have been going through difficult and possibly unpleasant challenges just because “No disciple is above his teacher”, so “if they persecuted me, they will also persecute you…. And they will do all these things to you on account of  my name, because they do not know the one who sent me.” (Jn 1,20-21)