Melbourne ¨C Suffering should be embraced and redeemed through service even when a result of a miscarriage of justice, Australia¡¯s Cardinal George Pell, who spent 404 days in jail before his sexual abuse conviction was overturned this week, wrote on Saturday.
Reiterating his innocence, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic cleric to have been jailed in the church¡¯s child sex abuse crisis urged Christians to help those suffering during the coronavirus pandemic.
¡°Christians see Christ in everyone who suffers ¡ª victims, the sick, the elderly ¡ª and are obliged to help,¡± Pell wrote in his Easter message in the Weekend Australian, accompanied by a photograph in which he wears his cardinal robes.
¡°I have just spent 13 months in jail for a crime I didn¡¯t commit, one disappointment after another (...) 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.¡±
A powerful government-appointed inquiry in 2017 found widespread instances of child abuse, often covered up, in several thousand Australian institutions, more than half of them religious.
¡°The sexual abuse crisis damaged thousands of victims,¡± Pell, who was acquitted by the high court on appeal, wrote in his piece. ¡°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.¡±
He added, ¡°So, too, some would see COVID-19 as a bad time for those who claim to believe in a good and rational God.¡±
Although fewer than a quarter of Australians declare themselves Catholic, the church has weathered the abuse scandals with the closure of a few parishes and its schools still enroll a fifth of all Australian students, government data shows.
Before walking free on Tuesday, the 78-year-old Pell, a former Vatican treasurer and a polarizing figure in Australia for his conservative views, was serving a six-year sentence for sexually assaulting two teenage choirboys in the 1990s.
¡°Everyone is confronted with a couple of questions,¡± Pell wrote. ¡°What should I do in this situation? Why is there so much evil and suffering? And why did this happen to me? Why the coronavirus pandemic?¡±
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