‘Travesty’ does not seem to begin to describe what has happened in a court in Victoria, Australia, with the appeal of George Cardinal Pell on sexual abuse charges being rejected 2 to 1 in a three-judge panel.
Readers may peruse the reflections of George Weigl and Matthew Schmitz for the details, all of which point to the innocence of the Cardinal and, within the strict limits of human law, at the very least to his not being found guilty. Whatever happened to ‘beyond reasonable doubt’?
The thing about lying, and one of the reasons it is intrinsically evil, is that not only does it distort the truth for others, but begins to distort the truth in one’s own mind. That is, one begins to believe one’s own lies, and reality itself becomes distorted. They will call good, evil, and evil, good. Saint Thomas Aquinas defines truth as adequatio rei et intellectus, a conformity between the mind and reality – once this becomes unhinged, perhaps slightly at first, then ever more so, one creates one’s own private little hell, a place of illusion, chaos, and self-centred desires.
Cardinal Pell was convicted before this trial even began. In the a priori biased minds of the ‘judges’, he had to be guilty just by his being associated with a tinged and guilty corporation, namely, the Catholic Church. The judges are not far from their intellectual, if more eloquent, predecessor, Voltaire: Ecrasez l’infame.
To my own mind – still, I hope, more or less grounded in reality, and, if biased, may it be in the right direction – this is the beginning of the imminent persecution of Catholics, beginning with prelates, at least of the conservative sort, but coming soon for all those who uphold the fullness of truth of the human person, especially in the realm of sexuality. We cannot expect justice, fairness, due process, balancing of evidence, probity of witnesses, habeas corpus and the rest of it – witness the debacle unfolding at the John Paul II Institute in Rome. The mere holding, never mind expressing, of ‘wrong opinions’ – chastity, ‘homophobia’, ‘transphobia’, climate change denial – will be enough to fire, shun, convict, sentence, lock up and, perhaps, even worse on the hazy horizon.
Meanwhile, on immimence, Mother Miriam of EWTN has exhorted parents to pull their children out of the school system forthwith, now, without delay, for the whole system has become one giant, behemothic indoctrination centre – see above on the au courant opinions, not least the rainbow LGBTQ, and protecting Mother Gaia. Sure, your children may resist – maybe – but they won’t be formed, they will leave the classroom usually more ignorant than when they went in.
Set up the ramparts! Homeschool, private school, or bust.
Did the Holy Father really join those ‘mourning’ the ‘death’ of a glacier in Iceland, a nation which boasts the elimination of every person with trisomy-21 – Down’s syndrome – from their island, most of them via elective abortion, innocents for whom no funeral will ever be held? Glaciers come and go. In fact, geological evidence claims that there was one over top of where I am now sitting, which melted away before the dawn of Man, or at least before the dawn of carbon-producing industry, and no one mourns its loss. In fact, I’m quite happy it’s gone, by means that were most definitely not anthropogenic.
The implicit premise of such ‘Man-caused climate change’ inverts means and ends, and leads to all sorts of evil, including ginger princes feeling guilty for siring future royals, or too many of them. Others are wondering whether it is right to have any children at all. Soon we will be like the Manichees of old, with the best option to commit slow suicide by starvation.
The Earth is made for Man, not Man for the Earth, and there is plenty, and plenty of room, for everyone, if we but use things rightly. We lose sight of that, we lose sight of everything.