Bloody Pell Cardinal George Pell, showing the priorities and sensitivity for which he is so renowned, has told the Global Institute of Church Management at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome that financial corruption “can pose a greater risk to clergy than sexual misconduct”.
And which member of the mainstream media has twisted Pell’s words in an ongoing mission to smear him? Why, it’s the Catholic World Report, reporting his approving quote of the unaccountably of still-sainted Mother Theresa:
… [Teresa] had said that for the clergy there are two great challenges: one touches on sexuality and another touched on money. And she thought that the danger from money was greater and stronger than that from errant sexuality.
Fetch the Bolt cutters Last week we observed that Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt might be actively trying to recover his glory days by being sued under the Racial Discrimination Act again.
He’s doing nothing to dissuade us. With his current targets — writers Osman Faruqi, Michelle Law, Bruce Pascoe — so far refusing to take the bait, he’s turned to young women of colour at the ABC who had the temerity to talk about their experience of racism (incidentally, the dead centre of the Venn diagram he throws darts at).
Apart from mocking Tahlea Aualiitia’s piece about the persistent misspelling of her name (including by her own employer), he’s upping the stakes by returning to that old favourite: skin colour.
Of former triple j presenter Gen Fricker he makes the following eye-watering aside:
… you might wonder about claims from a woman who insists she’s brown and others white when, for all we know, the other ABC staffers who look as pale as her might also actually be just as brown, too.
If this doesn’t get the desired result, are we to expect him to move onto skull shapes?
Guardians of civilisation We’re still not entirely sure this whole thing isn’t an exquisitely executed parody.
We’ve previously mentioned that the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation’s Twitter feed puts the semi-literate in seminal literature, and they’ve given us another classic, packing three spelling errors into a tweet spruiking Shakespeare’s “Macbath“.
Yep, one of the errors was the TITLE of the work they were promoting.
By this morning the account had realised and corrected the tweet. Except for…
Wacko watch Homes in Footscray are receiving copies of National Sunday Law, the manifesto of an apocalyptic, Seventh-day Adventist-adjacent sect. (Incidentally, it’s extremely anti-Catholic, if you prefer your bigotry a little more niche and old school.)
Its author A. Jan Marcussen recommends his followers randomly mail people the book. Are they, like Scientologists, using these admittedly apocalyptic times for a recruitment drive?
Have you received any interesting religious material since the pandemic started? Let us know.
Trump watch In a real case of “focusing on the wrong stuff”, Donald Trump lamenting “Where are you Roger Ailes?” while retweeting conservative commentator Brigitte Gabriel got a lot predictable chortling responses about Ailes’ current whereabouts.
No one seemed overly concerned about the fact he was promoting Gabriel, who runs ACT for America, an organisation the Southern Poverty Law Organisation describes thus:
… an anti-Muslim hate group because it pushes wild anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, denigrates American Muslims and deliberately conflates mainstream and radical Islam.
But of course, this is July 2020, and such things have long since ceased to be worthy of mention.
If you’re looking for some Trump Watch news for tomorrow, this Tweet has some interesting “just some coincidences, probably not actual Nazi references” points (also, scroll down for the 14/88 discussion and Trump’s 14 word tweet). I’d recommend some research and a grain of salt of course, who knows what’s real on Twitter any more.
https://twitter.com/SleepyDjango/status/1278473876461113344
I was brought up by a Protestant mother with very firm views on the Irish and Catholicism. I am no fan of Pell or any religion for that matter, but I wonder if Theresa’s words might have been misinterpreted.
The article presents her words as meaning financial transgressions as doing more damage to the well-being of the church and its staff than sexual abuse, but might not “the greater danger” mean “the more likely transgression” instead?
Just sayin’,
Mate Im not religious either but if you can stoop to try and destroy the reputation of a woman who from my ubderstanding gave her life to the less fortunate you have a very strange moral compass as some crikey writers appear to have. Just got my guardian subscription. More expensive but better balanced.
May I suggest, re “..a woman who from my ubderstanding gave her life to the less fortunate…“, some further reading?
I’m so glad that you are not religious because as far as I can see, George Pell was attempting to blur the edges of the difference between financial irregularities in the Catholic church and the sometimes life destroying consequences of sexual abuse perpetrated by a trusted clergy member.
This again convinces me that Pell is a psychopath, as he really still does not think the rules of decency and honesty apply to him.
For Pell to stoop to the misuse of Mother Teresa’s comment to attempt to ameliorate his offenses, found by the Royal Commission to be clear and obvious and substantiated is disgusting.
Even a friend of mine, a dedicated Catholic mother of four, was convinced by the Royal Commission’s findings. Up until there release, she had been steadfast in her defence of him.
Justin – I’m sorry that you have completely misinterpreted and/or misunderstood what I was trying to say. My comment was not a judgement of Theresa or what she said, just a simple question that she might have been saying that danger to the church was more likely to come from priests committing financial indiscretions than from priests committing sexual abuse. I don’t think she was saying financial indiscretions were worse than sexual abuse, but rather that they were more likely to be committed. You might even argue that she was speaking from a position of naivete because she couldn’t imagine priests doing that sort of thing.
And if you think the comments in The Guardian are more balanced that those here at Crikey, then fill your boots.
And its somewhat ironic that this article criticises the spelling errors of the Ramsay Centre, notes another article where someone complains about heir name being misspelt, yet Crikey still has two separate spellings of ” Mother Teresa” within the same article.
People in glass houses?
It’s almost as if you expect Creeky to have a sub editor, or basic standards of literacy.
I’d be careful, Phen. It’s “it’s” – and that was just your second word; not to mention ‘heir’.
Yep – was sadly inevitable that I would have a typo.
C’mon, surely someone writing a column complaining that her (unusual) name is sometimes misspelt deserves to be mocked. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I wanted to point out in the first story on the Rush Affair that the writer did not give His Honour, Justice Michael Wigney (kudos to Margot Saville), the courtesy of his full name or title, just referring to him by surname.
Way to win friends in the judiciary.
And Creeky breaks its own censorship record, a couple last week tied at 3 No Comment Allowed per edition but, with today’s FIVE (of 11 filler items) this flaccid organ has, yet again, poked its long suffering subscribers in the eye with the big stick of power.
It’s almost as if none of the staff has ever heard of Eric Blair or 1984.
Which, given that it appears to be mostly written by work experience 12yr olds, is probably the case.
I refuse to read any article that is so weak that it cannot bear scrutiny or comments.
This gutlessness does little to encourage loyalty or regard for probity.
If the law is that publications can be held responsible for defamatory comments of its readers, then I dont think you should blame Crikey for blocking comments on legally dicey subjects.
Good luck finding any publication that opens any article on Dyson Heydon for comments. Way too dangerous.
Sign of the times, people.
While the notion of defending any statement by Andrew Bolt initially causes me to question my sanity, I’m forced to the conclusion that just because we, on the progressive side of politics, find him and the majority of his opinions to be execrable, that in no way gives us free rein to ignore empirical evidence on the odd occasion he chooses to provide it.
That Bruce Pascoe is a talented writer cannot be in dispute. Whatever one may think of the conclusions drawn in the various Dark Emu books (and he sure pulls a long bow on some of them), they certainly add to a scholarly discussion of Koori agricultural practices over the last 1000 years. However, the fact that it has been proven beyond any doubt that all his grandparents are from European stock surely puts his claim to be Aboriginal in the same postcode as Helen (Demidenko) Darville’s original claim to be Ukranian. The time has definitely come for Bruce to acknowledge this anomaly, instead of obfuscating with comments such as “the full explanation would be very long and involved”, as he did in the article in the Weekend Australian magazine last year. It may well be that Bruce was genuinely mistaken about this initially, but with a mea culpa his literature could then stand and fall on it’s own merits, without other distractions.
As one of my American friends is fond of saying, sometimes you just have to give the devil his due.