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Vatican No. 3 Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Charges He Sexually Abused Two Young Choir Boys
FROM THE DAILY BEAST: A unanimous jury returned its verdict for Cardinal George Pell on Tuesday (Australian time) after more than three days of deliberations, the sources said, in a trial conducted under a gag order by the judge that prevented any details of the trial being made public.
Pell, the Vatican’s finance chief and the highest Vatican official to ever go on trial for sex abuse, left Rome in June 2017 to stand trial in Melbourne.
As that trial was about to get underway in June, a judge placed a suppression order on all press coverage in Australia, according to the order reviewed by The Daily Beast. Prosecutors applied for the order and it was granted to “prevent a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice.” That order remains in place in Australia.
It is hard to find news about this conviction, because the mainstream press has been ordered by the judge not to report this conviction. Apparently, the Australian judge’s order does not gag the American media.
So the UK’s Daily Mail ran this headline:
The incredible national news story that we CAN'T report: A very high-profile figure has been convicted of a serious crime - here's why you're not allowed to read about it
An Australian newspaper, The Age, ran this headline:
Why the media is unable to report on a case that has generated huge interest online
Australia’s The Daily Telegraph ran this headline:
An awful crime. The person is guilty. But we can’t publish the story
Do they really think that they can hide this news? By putting a gag order on the media, all they do is make more people curious. That’s like telling someone a “secret.” Everyone knows that the secret will spread like wildfire.
But this really is big news, because Cardinal Pell was considered to be the third most powerful man in the Vatican. No longer can the pope blame low-level pedophile priests, as if it is not really a Church problem. This marks a turning point, because it is the opening shot in a very large problem of pedophilia worldwide, not just in the church but throughout the political and corporate world as well.