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The Anatomy of a Pathology – Catholic World Report 30/5/20, 7:54 am
The Anatomy of a Pathology
An attempt at explaining the unhinged hatred displayed by Cardinal George Pell’s enemies
" May 25, 2020 # George Weigel $ Analysis, Features % 24 ! Print
Australian Cardinal George Pell relaxes on the grounds of the Seminary of the Good Shepherd in Sydney
April 9, 2020. Cardinal Pell was released from prison April 7 after the High Court of Australia unanimously
overturned the December 2018 jury verdict that found him guilty on !ve counts of molesting two 13-year-
old choirboys in 1996. (CNS photo/courtesy Archdiocese of Sydney)
Those who imagined that the sliming of Cardinal George Pell would stop as of April 7, when a
unanimous decision of the High Court of Australia acquitted him of “historical sexual abuse,” did
not reckon with the climate of venomous hatred that has surrounded Pell for decades, fouling
Australia’s public life, legal system, and politics in the process.
That climate certainly was a factor in the Victoria police department trolling for accusations
against George Pell (most of which were dismissed before trial; others were !nally quashed by
the High Court decision). That climate surely tainted the trial that led to the cardinal’s conviction
in December 2018, despite a jury having been shown that it was literally impossible for him to
have done what he was alleged to have done, where he was alleged to have done it, and in the
time-frame proposed by the prosecution. That climate likely in"uenced the otherwise
incomprehensible decision of two justices of the Supreme Court of the State of Victoria when, in
August 2019, they upheld the jury verdict in spite of a devastating dissent by the one justice on
the appellate panel with substantial criminal law experience. That climate shaped the
commentary of the gobsmacked anti-Pell Australian media in the immediate aftermath of the
High Court’s acquittal; no one in that baying mob of Pell-haters had the honesty or grace to
admit that the case against Pell had been irrational from the start, or that the High Court had
saved Australian justice from becoming an international laughingstock (and worse).
The incessant, even obsessive, degradation of Cardinal Pell has continued in recent weeks. After
the High Court’s decision, previously redacted portions of a report by Australia’s Royal
Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse were released. The anti-Pell
media, trying to rebound from the defeat it had just su#ered at the hands of Australia’s supreme
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judicial authority and stung by the bludgeoning it had taken from a few brave commentators in
the Australian press, claimed that the Royal Commission’s full report con!rmed their claims that
Pell had been part of a vast cover-up of such crimes as a young priest – this, despite the
cardinal’s vigorous rebuttal of those claims and massive evidence that it was Pell’s superiors who
had engineered and carried out the cover-up, sometimes in consort with the police..
The Royal Commission’s work will be addressed later, for it, too, was a#ected by the anti-Pell
climate of hate prevalent in many Australian circles: a climate of intellectual dishonesty, religious
prejudice, and vile politics redolent of that which fouled the public air during the Dreyfus A#air in
late-19th century France. The !rst order of business, however, is to try to understand just what
spawned this climate of hatred.
The short answer is that the public climate of rabid Pell-hatred is the by-product of certain
poisonous fumes that have polluted public life Down Under for decades. Some of those fumes
were spewed into the atmosphere from Australian politics. Others were generated by a very ugly
Catholic history for which George Pell has been scapegoated. Still others involve an aggressive
secularist assault on biblical religion. Together, these combustible elements ignited to create a
public atmosphere of irrationality unbecoming a mature democracy. That atmosphere created
the circumstances in which George Pell’s critics and enemies were able, with virtual impunity, to
defame one of Australia’s most distinguished sons, and do so with a ferocity that has led the
unhinged to issue death threats against him.
How did this happen? Australian public life is not for the faint of heart, but this is not typical
Aussie hardball. This is something properly described as pathological, and the underlying
pathogens should be explored. In doing so, it will be helpful to distinguish the pathogens
generated by Australian politics from the ecclesiastical pathogens, although the two reinforced
each other for decades and continue to do so today.
The Political Pathogens
The political side of this tawdry story requires a dive into the mid-20th century history of the
Australian trade union movement and the Australian Labour Party: a tale that revolves around a
formidable !gure named B.A. (“Bob”) Santamaria, arguably the most controversial Catholic !gure
in Australian history prior to George Pell.
Many Australian unions were deeply penetrated by communists in the 1930s and were thus
aligned with the policies of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The disturbing e#ects of that penetration were
soon evident. As a member of the British Commonwealth, Australia quickly entered World War II
when its government accepted Great Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on September 3,
1939; Berlin, however, was then allied with Moscow through the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-
aggression pact of August 23, 1939. So when Australian troops were sent to the Middle East in
support of Britain’s e#orts to halt the German advance there, unionized Australian dockworkers
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refused to load military supplies intended for their deployed countrymen – and would not do so
until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 put paid to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact,
Stalin switched sides, and the word went out from Moscow that Hitler was now the enemy.
Strong communist in"uence in the Australian unions also had serious repercussions in the
Australian Labour Party [ALP], which was wedded to the country’s unions even more closely than
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party was to the unions of the American Federation of Labor
and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In the U.S., trade unions were one important part
of a complex Democratic coalition that also included Wilsonian progressives, southern
segregationists, and big-city Catholic ethnics in the Northeast and Midwest; in Australia, the ALP
was the political expression of the unions, period. And while communists had not completely
gotten control of the ALP, non-communist members of the party feared, in the early 1940s, that
it was only a matter of time before the takeover was complete and the ALP became irreversibly
aligned with Soviet policy.
Enter Bob Santamaria.
A labor activist and devout Catholic whose mind and spirit were shaped by the social doctrine of
Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI, Santamaria was a shrewd political strategist and tactician as well
as a serious thinker. As such, he realized that the only way to break the communist hold on the
unions, and therefore on the Australian Labour Party, was to out-organize the communists from
the bottom up, on the shop "oor level. At the state and federal levels, communists controlled the
levers of power; and while they did not insist on communist ALP candidates for state and federal
o$ce, they welcomed what were then known as fellow travellers. Their grip on the unions and
thus on the ALP could be broken, however, if the communists could be out-voted at the most
basic level of union activity: individual workplaces or shop "oors, where the process of choosing
state and federal union and party o$cials (and thus selecting political candidates for election to
the state and federal parliaments) began.
Santamaria, often working through parish priests who helped him identify union members
amenable to reason, created what became known as the Movement: a reforming e#ort that
taught trade unionists the principles of Catholic social doctrine, trained them in leadership and
organizational skills, and then, shop "oor by shop "oor, took back the Australian labor
movement from the communists. By the mid-1950s, communists had lost control of every major
union in Australia and their in"uence within the ALP had been seriously eroded.
None of this was easy, and the battle to save Australian trade unionism created rifts within the
Catholic Church, religious home of many union members. Bishops with di#erent ideas of the
Church’s role in public life took di#erent positions on Santamaria and the Movement’s e#orts, to
the point where an appeal was made to Rome to sort things out; Rome’s Delphic response (don’t
form a Catholic political party – which no one, including Bob Santamaria, was proposing – but
!ght the communists) settled nothing, and the division between pro-Santamaria bishops and
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anti-Santamaria bishops presaged, in a way, the split in the ALP itself in the mid-1950s. A new
party, the Democratic Labour Party [DLP], was built on Santamaria’s principles. As the junior
partner in a coalition, the DLP helped the Australian Liberal Party (which is actually the
conservative party in Australia), dominate the country’s national politics until the mid-1970s.
It would be an exaggeration, but only a slight one, to say that Bob Santamaria was the crucial
!gure in forestalling what might have been the communist takeover of Australia. By breaking the
communists’ hold on the key trade unions, he undermined the communists’ in"uence in the ALP.
The subsequent fracture of the ALP was a bitter one, and Bob Santamaria was never forgiven by
the ideologically hardened elements of the Australian Left for his work in the 1940s and 1950s.
Over time, the hard Left in Australia, like others of similar disposition throughout the world, took
the exit ramp from Marx-and-Lenin Boulevard onto Antonio Gramsci Parkway: making its peace,
more or less, with a market-oriented economy, the Aussie hard Left, tutored by the Italian
Marxist theorist Gramsci, began the long march through the institutions of culture. Rather than
pursuing control of the “means of production,” as old-school Marxists would have tried to do, the
hard-core Australian Left undertook a program of radical secularization of public life, support for
the sexual revolution in all its manifestations, and, most recently, identity politics.
That program successfully conquered much of the Australian media, much of the Australian
university world, and indeed most of Australian culture (high and low); at the same time, cowed
politicians of more conservative social instincts were brought to heel, such that what was once
the far Left became the center of Australian politics. The result in much of Australia is a de facto
dictatorship of relativism, in which shaming, ridicule, and the relentless media persecution of
dissenters from the mainstream, nihilistic cultural consensus have been used to create a public
climate that (as one veteran Australian political operative put it to me) “makes California look like
Alabama by contrast.” In his exasperation, my friend perhaps heightened the contrast (for one
ought not sell California’s polymorphous perversities short); and he was speci!cally referring to
the State of Victoria. But similar, if not quite-so-dramatic, situations obtain throughout the
country, not least because of the virtually complete capture by the Left of the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, the taxpayer-supported national television and radio service.
Yet despite its success in the long march through the institutions of culture and the
transformation that success has produced in Aussie politics, the ideologically hardened
Australian Left continued to hate Bob Santamaria. For Santamaria had compounded the original
sin for which the Left never forgave him – beating the communists at their own organizing game
in the 1940s and 1950s – by his defense of Pope Paul VI’s teaching on human love and the
appropriate means of family planning in the 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. In that defense, Bob
Santamaria was a lonely !gure among publicly prominent Australian Catholics and did not have
the same success within the Church as he’d had in his struggle for the body and soul of
Australian trade unionism. But he fought on. And in the decades between Humanae Vitae and his
death in 1998, Santamaria became a vocal proponent of the dynamic orthodoxy and social
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doctrine of Pope John Paul II.
In that, as in his ongoing battle against the lifestyle Left, he found a co-belligerent in a man he
befriended and to whom he became something of a mentor: George Pell.
Preaching the homily at Santamaria’s funeral in 1998, then-Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne
began on a wry note: “We are told that the sure mark of a false prophet is that all people speak
well of him. In death, as in life, Bob Santamaria has triumphantly escaped such a fate.” And then,
at the mid-point of his homily, Archbishop Pell highlighted two facets of Santamaria’s character,
the !rst of which was ignored by Santamaria’s enemies in their polemic against him: “He had
huge and hidden reserves of compassion for individuals, which never obscured his clarity of
mind about principles and issues.” In the retrospect of two decades, it seems an eerie
premonition of the fate that George Pell himself would su#er at the hands of the same enemies
– the degradation of one’s essential humanity and decency because of the political incorrectness
of one’s ideas.
Thus one important piece of the puzzle in the anatomy of Pell-hatred: George Pell, the political
disciple, as stand-in for B.A. Santamaria, the ancient bogeyman of the hardcore Australian Left.
The Ecclesiastical Pathogens
Seeking to ignite the "ames of evangelical fervor, Pope John Paul II often used unexpected, even
shocking, episcopal appointments to jolt self-satis!ed, dispirited, or moribund local Churches
into renewed Catholic vitality. Appointing Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger, the son of Polish Jews, as
archbishop of Paris was one such example. John J. O’Connor to New York and Francis George,
OMI, to Chicago (after very short stays in their previous dioceses) were two more instances, as
were Desmond Connell to Dublin and Joachim Meisner to Cologne. In some cases, this papal
form of shock therapy worked; in others (notably Ireland and Germany), it didn’t. The
nominations of George Pell as auxiliary bishop of Melbourne and then that city’s archbishop,
followed by his appointment as archbishop of Sydney and a cardinal, certainly !t that pattern.
And while Pell’s indefatigable work in reigniting dynamic orthodoxy in Australia has borne
considerable fruit over the past several decades, it has also cost him dearly. For the situation he
was charged with changing was a particularly foul one, and, for a variety of reasons, both political
and ecclesiastical, Pell took (and is taking) the blast of opprobrium that ought to have been
directed at wickedly malfeasant churchmen.
When George Pell returned to Australia after theological studies in Rome (where he was
ordained in 1966) and doctoral studies in history at Oxford, he served in numerous capacities in
the Diocese of Ballarat, where he had been born in 1941. The bishop of Ballarat, Ronald
Mulkearns, was a typical clerical autocrat of the pre-Vatican II era, trying to govern his diocese in
the post-Vatican II Church through the old methods. When Pell was appointed auxiliary bishop of
Melbourne in 1987, he found himself under the authority of an archbishop, Frank Little, who did
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not welcome Pell’s appointment (to put it gently). In their di#erent personal styles, Mulkearns
and Little presided over local Churches that exempli!ed many of the serious problems besetting
Australian Catholicism in the immediate post-Vatican II years: a rapid decline in Mass attendance
and other forms of Catholic sacramental practice; a meltdown of consecrated religious life and a
mass exodus from the priesthood; doctrinal ambiguity, weak spiritual formation, and moral
laxity in seminaries; catechetical silliness that emptied Catholic faith of its content and its
mystery, and thus of its magnetism; a deterioration of Catholic identity and the reduction of
Catholicism to an ethnic marker; a deep de!cit in evangelical energy; and, because of all this, an
unwillingness or inability (or both) to respond creatively to the secularist assault being mounted
on the culture (and the Church) by the new Gramscians of the Australian Left.
These de!cits of Catholic conviction and ecclesiastical spine were evident for those with eyes to
see and ears to hear in the 1970s and early 1980s: a small band that included Bob Santamaria
and George Pell. What was not evident, and which bishops like Mulkearns and Little did
everything in their power to keep hidden, was Australia’s grave crisis of clerical sexual abuse.
That crisis involved both diocesan clergy and religious priests and brothers; and it was as bad, or
worse, than elsewhere in the world Church. Lives were ruined; bishops and religious superiors,
intent on preventing the “scandal” they imagined would ensue if the facts became public,
determinedly kept these sins and crimes away from public scrutiny – thus magnifying the scandal
when the dike of deception inevitably broke. And in that strategy of information-lockdown,
bishops and religious superiors had, at the time, the cooperation of the public authorities,
including the Victoria police department.
When George Pell was named as Archbishop Little’s successor in 1996, he immediately got to
work putting dynamic orthodoxy in business in Melbourne, paying particular attention to the
reform of religious education and catechetics. Perhaps his most striking e#ort involved the lax
local seminary. When Archbishop Pell insisted that daily Mass and the regular recitation of the
Liturgy of the Hours begin again – moves regarded by the seminary faculty as reactionary – the
faculty, thinking to call the archbishop’s blu#, threatened to resign en masse. Pell, a former
Australian-rules football star who does not scare easily, accepted the resignations and then set
about reforming the curriculum and discipline of the seminary. It was an unmistakable signal
that the lassitude, "accidity, and general weakness that had too often characterized post-
conciliar Catholic life in Melbourne were going to be challenged, and by the leader of the
archdiocese.
Pell also addressed the abuse crisis vigorously, the !rst bishop in Australia to do so. His
predecessor, Archbishop Little, had kept no records of abuse claims, from his installation as
ordinary in 1974 until 1993, three years before his sudden retirement; Little handled such cases
personally and in strictest con!dence, determined to quarantine the information he had as much
as possible. Bishop Mulkearns in Ballarat had followed a similar policy, which included, in both
Melbourne and Ballarat, reassigning known abusers. Pell was determined to take a radically
di#erent path, which he believed was both a demand of justice and an essential part of his
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broader work of authentic Catholic reform.
Within a hundred days of becoming archbishop of Melbourne, Pell appointed an Independent
Commissioner to receive and evaluate claims of clerical sexual abuse, and worked closely with
the Victoria police to avoid archdiocesan interference in their investigations and to seek their
counsel in developing the protocols by which the Independent Commissioner would work.
Neither the Independent Commissioner’s !ndings nor police !ndings were contested by the
archdiocese. Pell also created what became known as the Melbourne Response. The !rst
procedure of its kind in the world, the Response was intended to facilitate !nancial assistance
and counselling for abuse victims through a process that did not require them to seek legal
representation or to establish the Church’s legal liability. At the time, the Victoria police
welcomed the Response (which was led by lay legal professionals), calling it “a positive step in
tackling this very sensitive community issue,” and similarly applauded the appointment of a
distinguished barrister as Independent Commissioner. (Some 224 complaints of sexual abuse
from the 1970s, 82 complaints from the 1980s, 12 complaints from the 1990s, and one
subsequent complaint were upheld by the Response.)
George Pell took a similarly vigorous approach to Church reform when John Paul II transferred
him to Sydney as that city’s archbishop in 2001, and two years later created him a cardinal. As in
Melbourne, revitalizing the local seminary, strengthening religious education, and supporting lay
renewal movements were Pell priorities. And in Sydney, Pell seized the opportunity to
underscore one of his longstanding concerns as an archdiocesan ordinary: reanimating
Australian Catholicism’s sense that its local Churches were component parts of a universal
Church centered in Rome. Thus Pell asked, and Pope Benedict XVI agreed, that World Youth Day-
2008 be held in Sydney. And contrary to the carping of the usual naysayers, it was a considerable
success.
At the outset of his Sydney years, Pell was himself accused of acts of sexual abuse allegedly
committed forty years earlier. Having established protocols for handling such accusations similar
to those he had created in Melbourne, Pell, after vigorously declaring his innocence, stepped
aside from the governance of the archdiocese until a former Victoria Supreme Court justice
could independently investigate the matter – a step Pell took against the advice of an
overwrought senior Vatican o$cial who urged Pell to “sue him [the accuser]; sue him!” Justice
Alec Southwell, Q.C., dismissed the complaint.
In the eighteen years he served as archbishop of Melbourne and archbishop of Sydney, George
Pell’s reforming e#orts in those two large archdioceses were subject to relentless criticism by the
proponents of Catholic Lite, who found a ready megaphone for their anti-Pell attacks in the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation and much of the Australian print media. In those same
years, Pell’s refusal to kowtow to political correctness lit up the Australian Left on a regular basis
– and like his ecclesiastical critics, his political foes found ABC and many print outlets eager to
amplify their complaints. Pell refused to bend to the gay insurgency and was thus regularly
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portrayed as a homophobe. He debated with relish the “new atheist” Richard Dawkins, in what
ABC must have imagined would be Pell’s intellectual Waterloo; the cardinal more than held his
own as Dawkins, presumably sharing ABC’s view that Pell was a pre-modern booby of a Catholic
bishop, was ill-prepared and boring. When the Gramscian Left in Australia converted to Gaia-
worship and declared anthropogenic global warming a settled fact, and a civilization-ending
threat to be handled by a massive expansion of governmental control of economic life, Pell
begged to di#er – and was thus anathematized by his enemies as a heretic as well as a
homophobe and a scienti!c ignoramus. It hardly needs saying that Pell was also attacked for
these opinion crimes by his ecclesiastical opponents and enemies, who saw in them further
challenges to Catholic Lite, which had long made its peace with the political Left in Australia.
George Pell infuriated his critics because he refused to concede that what the Gramscian Left
and the proponents of Catholic Lite had long assumed settled was in fact settled. He did not
think the ratchet of history worked in only one direction. He was not cowed by the polemics
typically deployed from the portside of the political and ecclesiastical spectrums and then
disseminated by much of the Australian media. This led to befuddled outrage: What was it about
this man, this infuriating public !gure who did not bend as so many others had?
So a venomous conviction seems to have formed in the minds of George Pell’s enemies: Pell
must be a wicked man, because only a wicked man could hold such retrograde views and
espouse such a reactionary cause as classic Christian doctrine and morality.
Thus George Pell’s dynamic Catholic orthodoxy and his refusal to concede the moral, social, and
political rectitude of the hardened Left’s most cherished causes en"amed the minds of his critics
and enemies, both political and ecclesiastical, generating pathogens. Those pathogens interacted
to create the pathology of phobic Pell-hatred: in truth, a form of public mental illness, similar to
what might have been found in Dreyfus-era France or Cultural Revolution-era China. This
pathology often precluded rational judgment about anything involving Cardinal Pell. And
whipped up into a public frenzy by ABC and others in the Australian media, Pell-hatred inevitably
led to the determination, Pell delendus est: Pell must be destroyed.
Precisely how this project was then acted upon, in Australia and perhaps elsewhere (once
Cardinal Pell was transferred to Rome to reform Vatican !nances and attracted new enemies in
the dark underside of international !nance), remains a puzzle. Solving that puzzle requires the
discovery of a few more essential pieces, and thus cannot be explored here – although, from a
legal point of view, the most recent e#ort to destroy George Pell once and for all was rebu#ed in
no uncertain terms by the Australian High Court on April 7, 2020.
Yet the phobia of Pell-hatred remains, fouling the public atmosphere of Cardinal Pell’s beloved
country. And that brings this analysis, by way of a (mercifully!) brief conclusion, to the release of
the previously redacted sections of the Royal Commission’s report on sexual abuse – and the
latest public wave of assault on Cardinal Pell’s character.
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In the Star Chamber
Royal Commissions are not judicial bodies and do not operate under the strict rules of evidence
and the standard of guilt-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt that govern (or should govern) criminal
trials. And while the Royal Commission in question was established to look into various
Australian institutions’ handling of the sexual abuse of the young, it seemed clear from the
outset that the Royal Commission was primarily interested in the Catholic Church – and in
Cardinal George Pell in particular. The Commission, half of whose members did not have legal
experience, seemed to give something of a pass to the Victoria police, who, knowing of abuse,
had gravely failed in their responsibilities to protect young people in the 1970s. But during
twenty hours of their hostile grilling of George Pell, the commissioners and their counsel seemed
to imagine that a young priest would have been told about, and should and could have done
something about, crimes being concealed by a secretive and autocratic bishop – even though the
Commission found that Bishop Mulkearns had hidden information about Gerald Ridsdale, one of
the worst of the priest-abusers, from others, including senior Catholic o$cials. And in its
assessment of Pell, the Royal Commission gave short shrift to his vigorous response to clerical
sexual abuse when he had the authority to do something about it – a response that included,
shortly after his becoming archbishop of Melbourne, sacking two abuser-priests as well as
empowering the independent Commissioner to investigate abuse claims and creating the
Melbourne Response to aid victims.
That the Royal Commission’s assumptions and judgments were almost certainly warped by the
fetid public atmosphere surrounding George Pell – and indeed by the speci!c ideological content
of much of that anti-Pell venom – was illustrated by the di#erent treatment the Commission
meted out to Paul Bongiorno and George Pell. Like Pell, Bongiorno was a priest of the Ballarat
diocese in the 1970s. One of Gerald Ridsdale’s victims told the Royal Commission that he had
informed Bongiorno about Ridsdale’s crimes. The Commission did not call Bongiorno to testify;
Bongiorno said in a statement that he did not remember such a conversation.
Now, compare and contrast: There is no corroborating evidence, written or oral, to buttress the
Royal Commission’s judgment that George Pell must have known of Gerald Ridsdale’s crimes;
there is, in fact, ample evidence that Bishop Mulkearns deliberately kept diocesan consultors like
Pell in the dark about such matters. And there is Pell’s testimony, as well as that of others, that
he was not informed of Ridsdale’s crimes. By contrast, there is a victim’s testimony that he had
told Paul Bongiorno what Ridsdale was doing.
The Royal Commission accepted Bongiorno’s statement that he recalled no such conversation
(claiming that it could not resolve the di#erence between the victim’s account and Bongiorno’s).
The Royal Commission disbelieved Pell’s testimony and the testimony of those who adamantly
insisted that Pell was telling the truth when he insisted he knew nothing of Ridsdale’s abuse (and
others’) because of Mulkearns’ cover-up. Why?
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Might that have something to do with the fact that Paul Bongiorno abandoned the Catholic
priesthood to become a left-leaning journalist and ABC commentator, fully in sync with the
dominant Australian media culture, while George Pell is a staunch defender of Catholic
orthodoxy and a foe of political correctness? Why did the Royal Commission evidently assume
that Bongiorno is a man of integrity while assuming precisely the opposite about George Pell?
Did the poisonous atmosphere analyzed here have something to do with that?
Leaders of the Catholic Church in Australia in the last decades of the twentieth century
shamefully covered up the sexual abuse of the young. So did various public authorities, often
cooperating with bishops and religious superiors in doing so. Why, then, has Cardinal George Pell
become the scapegoat for the gross negligence of others?
Score-setting is an ugly business. It has assumed an exceptionally repulsive countenance in Pell-
hatred and its attendant scapegoating. An innocent man continues to be defamed. And there is a
real danger that, because of hatreds political and ecclesiastical, young people are being left at
risk because public attention to the societal plague of the sexual abuse of the young is being
misdirected.
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About George Weigel & 278 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center,
where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty
books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the
Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The
Fragility of Order: Catholic Re"ections on Turbulent Times (Ignatius Press, 2018). His most recent
book is The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the
Modern World to Reform.
© Catholic World Report
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