CNA Staff, Apr 10, 2020 / 03:35 pm (CNA).- Cardinal George Pell said Friday that suffering can be offered to God for good, and that Christians see Christ in the suffering, and are obliged to help them. His message came days after his release from prison, and amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
“The sexual abuse crisis damaged thousands of victims. From many points of view the crisis is also bad for the Catholic Church, but we have painfully cut out a moral cancer and this is good. So too some would see COVID-19 as a bad time for those who claim to believe in a good and rational God, the Supreme Love and Intelligence, the Creator of the universe,” Pell wrote in an Easter message published by The Australian April 10.
“It is a mystery; all suffering, but especially the massive number of deaths through plagues and wars. But Christians can cope with suffering better than the atheists can explain the beauty and happiness of life,” the cardinal added.
Pell was convicted in December 2018 of sexually assaulting two choirboys at the Melbourne Cathedral in 1996. On April 7, the Australian High Court unanimously ruled that the evidence presented during the trial would not have allowed the jury to avoid reasonable doubt and ordered Pell’s acquittal and release after more than 400 days in prison.
The High Court’s Tuesday decision marked the end of a nearly three-year legal process which began in June 2017, when the cardinal was charged with several counts of sexual assault dating back decades. The majority of these charges were dropped before they could be brought to trial.
Pell, who was most recently the Archbishop of Sydney before he left Australia in 2014 for a Vatican position as prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy, has returned to Sydney after his release from prison.
In his message, the cardinal acknowledged his incarceration, writing that “I have just spent 13 months in jail for a crime I didn’t commit, one disappointment after another. I knew God was with me, but I didn’t know what He was up to, although I realised He has left all of us free. But with every blow it was a consolation to know I could offer it to God for some good purpose like turning the mass of suffering into spiritual energy.”
“The only Son of God did not have an easy run and suffered more than his share. Jesus redeemed us and we can redeem our suffering by joining it to His and offering it to God,” Pell added.
In a reference to the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, Pell noted that in times of plague and difficulty, Christians were unique in the ancient world for their commitment to nurse and care for the sick.
“Too often the irreligious want to eliminate the cause of the suffering, through abortion, euthanasia, or exclude it from sight, leaving our loved ones unvisited in nursing homes. Christians see Christ in everyone who suffers — victims, the sick, the elderly — and are obliged to help,” he wrote.
The Easter message of Sydney’s current leader, Archbishop Anthony Fisher, also addressed hope and the coronavirus pandemic.
“Dare we hope in a world that is suffering? It can seem impossible, even insensitive, to talk of hope when people are sick or dying, anxious or isolated, unemployed or otherwise burdened,” Fisher’s message said.
There is, however, reason for hope, the archbishop wrote.
“Think of the countless acts of selfless service we’ve witnessed of late from health workers, neighbours, families, pastors. Think of the novel pastoral responses to this novel coronavirus. In times like these people of faith and ideals really shine.”
“On Easter night the new Easter candle is normally lit and carried into the Church as a symbol of Christ, our light returned and hope restored. This year there’ll be no congregation to light their own candles from it. But already people are demonstrating Easter light in their works of mercy and prayer,“ Fisher wrote.
Cardinald Pell’s release from prison this week has been controversial, and was met with protest in Australia.
Hours after Pell was exonerated, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne was vandalized. The cathedral’s door was spray-painted with a cartoon image of a devil, along with the message “ROT IN HELL, PELL.” Other doors were daubed with upside-down crosses and the words “NO JUSTICE,” “PAEDO RAPIST,” and: “The law protects the powerful.”
Archbishop Peter Comensoli of Melbourne told Australian media that while he was upset about the vandalism, he was “not entirely surprised.”
“There remains such strong emotions around all of these matters,” Comensoli told Australian news network 3AW.
The cardinal’s Easter message included a proclamation of the Gospel: that Jesus of Nazareth died, and was resurrected bodily. “It was a return of his entire person from death, breaking the rules of health and physics, as Christians believe this young man was the only Son of God, divine, the Messiah…who redeems us, enables us to receive forgiveness and enter into a happy eternity.”
On April 7, the day he was released from prison, the cardinal told CNA that “prayer has been the great source of strength to me throughout these times, including the prayers of others, and I am incredibly grateful to all those people who have prayed for me and helped me during this really challenging time.”
[…]
A minimum wage set by the State is a bad idea to begin with and the fact that the Australian Bishops are calling for an increase seems to be a sign of their misplaced priorities, which ought to be on evangelization in such a secularized country. When I lived in Australia in the late nineties, I never met any poor people nor did I find any tenement housing or other signs of poverty. Of course, since then the price of housing has skyrocketed. This problem arises from housing bubbles, and fractional reserve banking so that people have to enslave themselves to the banks in order to get a place to live in and continue such enslavement for some 40 years. Governments are part of this problem as the higher the price of housing the more they get in tax income. Once can hardly believe that there is insufficient land for building in Australia, in the U.S. and many other countries.
The minimum wage tends to increase the percentage of youth unemployment as those who may be able to hire unskilled workers don’t due to such a minimum wage and other taxes on employment. Maybe the bishops could support some form of apprenticeships, something that traditionally existed by means of the guilds. Instead of more State involvement, what is needed, among other things, is to get the dictatorial Nanny State out of many areas which it controls and makes a mess of. Why should there be so much tax on the creation of jobs? Mainly to finance the Welfare State, which in my opinion should be dismantled and people should be taught to be responsible, to save and freely look after themselves, the State, having only a subsidiary role as the Church’s Social Teaching rightly holds. For that of course, people ought to be able to save and receive a decent interest on their savings. When I was in Australia, one could get 6% p.a. interest on a term deposit guaranteed. These days, one would be luck to get 0.25% which is what one gets in the European Union.