As a footnote to what I just wrote about the patent Catholic connection to yesterday's Supreme Court McCutcheon ruling, which is the kind of ruling one has to expect powerful white Catholic men who are both well-connected to the 1% and well-connected to the Catholic hierarchy to hand down, when the Catholic hierarchy itself is increasingly indistinguishable from the 1%:
Here's Jesuit Father Andrew Hamilton writing at the Eureka Street blog site about Cardinal Pell:
The story of [abuse survivor John] Ellis' encounters with the Catholic Church suggests that, with a few notable exceptions, Sydney Church leaders did not see him primarily as a vulnerable person to whom they should reach out in compassion. They viewed him as a threat to the financial wellbeing of the Sydney Catholic Church. Even though it was recognised that he had been abused by a Catholic priest, the callous treatment he received was inspired by the desire to avoid large compensation payments.
The disturbing consequence of this strategy, adopted widely in the Catholic Church, is that Catholic leaders effectively accepted that human worth can be measured by economic price. They accepted that the priority of the Church lay in the market where its task was to preserve and enhance its financial resources. They accepted that the Church and Ellis were competitors in the market, and so adversaries.
And here's Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald:
What part of all this does the cardinal, and the church that has just kicked him upstairs, not understand?
What they do understand is money. Pell's cruelty was thrift led. In spending $2 million to defend a case he could have settled for $750,000, he was penning a missive to all those other lives broken by "mother church": don't even think about it. To this extent it's clear the Vatican has picked the right man as financial honcho: someone prepared to prioritise money over morality.
Money talks. The money controlled by white men who own things talks louder than any money in the world. It talks louder than most real people in the world.
And as long as Pope Francis merely talks about these matters, while refusing to deal head-on, unambiguously with those who have made this system of thinking intrinsic to advancement within the Catholic hierarchy--as long as Pope Francis does not side unambiguously with the victims of this cruel amoral system, no matter how deeply it is now entrenched in the Catholic hierarchy--he will remain a part of the problem. And will not be a part of the solution.
Please see this previous posting for my source for the photograph of Cardinal Pell arriving at the Royal Commission abuse hearing recently.
And p.s. My apologies to wolves for my comments about them in the posting to which the preceding link points. I ought not have been so mean-spirited as to compare my lupine brothers and sisters to members of the Catholic hierarchy.
