Dear Mhaze,

I don't think that Pell's conviction, as much as they now rejoice, was a deliberate conspiracy by the Left/Progressives. Far more likely, it was initiated by the Italian Mafia, which groomed and trained the "victim"/witness, then activated their plan the moment his friend died and could no longer contradict his evidence (or was this overdose-death really an accident?...).

[
Senior Calabrian Mafia investigator Nicola Gratteri, whose investigative zeal has forced him to live with police protection since 1989, has said the pope’s plans to reform Vatican structures, including the Vatican bank, the IOR, could prove a problem for the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s most powerful Mafia.

He said that while Pope John Paul II called on the “military” mafiosi to “repent” in 1993, Pope Francis has gone further, perhaps hitting the ’Ndrangheta where it hurts.

“He has named his G8 [council of cardinals] to overhaul the entire structure of the Vatican, including a review of the Vatican’s economic affairs and in particular, the IOR,” Gratteri says.

“For those with real economic power it is obvious this could be a huge disadvantage . . . Given that in the past we’ve had collusion at the highest level between church and Mafia, this exposes the pope.”

Months after this report, Cardinal George Pell was named by Francis to reform the IOR. In 2014, Pell said his team found nearly two billion euros hidden away in various Vatican accounts, off the balance sheets. In November 2015, with the Pope’s approval, Pell issued new guidelines for running all Vatican offices, to bring them up to international standards for financial transparency.

In April 2016, without consulting Pell, the Vatican Secretary of State suspends an external audit of Vatican finances. The National Catholic Register quotes an unnamed source as saying that officials are afraid of what the audit will find, and want to get rid of Pell. A year later, Pell was charged in Melbourne with sexual abuse. And that was the end of the Pell threat to the Vatican Bank insiders.
]

- http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cardinal-pell-the-mafia/

Of course, let's believe the witness - i.e if we are emotional Catholic-haters and drongos. Someone who should know a thing or two: Justice Michael McHugh, High Court, 1994.

"It is the everyday experience of the courts that honest witnesses are frequently in error about the details of events. The more accounts that they are asked to give the greater is the chance that there will be discrepancies about details and even inconsistencies in the various accounts … If a jury thinks that the demeanour of the witness or the probability of occurrence of the witness’s general account is persuasive, they may reasonably think that discrepancies or even inconsistencies concerning details are of little moment."

So, it seems that courts don't see a witness as unreliable if their statements and answers are sometimes out of tune. However, the Victorian numpty judges used this 'understandable' failing as proof that the witness in Pell's case had to be credible!

I'm not going to waste my time elaborating further to a group of people who have kept saying the same thing during this drawn out thread leading nowhere; but, for the few of you who are capable of understanding, see Keith Windschuttle's column in Quadrant Online today.

Is Mise,

Monsignor Portelli and Mr Potter's evidence was
rejected by both the unanimous jury and the majority
judges in their verdict of finding Pell guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt.

As far as I'm aware Portelli and Potter
were never accused of perjury

Keith Windschuttle - the man who imagines conspiracy
where there is none. Coming from the hard left and
having switched to the hard right when it was
opportune to do so, Windschuttle's paranoid style is
understandable. He's had to earn his stripes since
swapping sides and, like all apostates, his ideological
arguments are more extreme than his more established
counterparts.

Windshuttle's attemps continue to whip up irrational
fear. His objections always fails to address the
middle-ground, and therefore is out of touch.
Still he does have an appeal to a certain group.
Who can't think for themselves.

So quite a few are again accusing me of believing in a conspiracy. Projection much? I've never used the word in regards to this issue.

But I do see various groups with similar aims (ie knee-cap the churches) who worked toward the same objective.

Poor old Paul, who always seems to get over-wrought whenever his fondest fables are challenged, advised that the appellate court wasn't part of the conspiracy. Since I didn't suggest it was, his hysteria seemed a little...ahem..hysterical.

And we even see poor SR get a bit on edge at my point. Again I wasn't suggesting that the convictions, rightful and correctly adjudicated, of many of those priests convicted were anything but valid and desirable. I was talking about the urge to GET Pell by various portions of the governing class. Despite repeated failures to find valid or any evidence they continued the endeavour whilst slowly destroying any chance that he find a jury that wasn't already spectacularly tainted against him personally.

That will happen again and more often.

Again I'd point out how many here, when confronted with the relative lack of evidence against Pell, go running back to the notion that the whole church was guilty and therefore he was as well eg SR's cry of vindication "This discredited lot are getting their just reward". That is, in the eyes of those like SR, Pell being guilty or not of this particular crime, his punishment is justified and celebrated because he was a member, a leader no less, of an ostracised group.

This type of thinking won't end well. The people who think that its OK to get the opposition by any means, fair or foul, are always surprised when the same rules are, eventually, applied to them.

//Mein Kampf enjoyed a 10 million copies run during Hitler's lifetime// you don't say ttbn. If I was living in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 I to would have a copy of Mein Kampf displayed prominently on the coffee table for all to see, in the same period about 10% of Germans joined the Nazi Party, they knew which side their bread was buttered.

Now if I was living in Stalinist Russia during those years and beyond I would have had a picture of Comrade Stalin displayed prominently on the lounge room wall. Like the Germans, the Russians also knew what was good for them.