This Holy Week, the theme of “truth” comes to us cloaked in judicial proceedings, from today’s headlines to the Good Friday Passion liturgy. God is very interested, indeed, in the cause of justice:
You have been told, O mortal, what is good,
and what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do justice and to love goodness,
and to walk humbly with your God.
Mi. 6:8. Fittingly, Micah chapter 6 is styled as a legal case brought by God against His wayward people. Justice is one of the Cardinal Virtues, yet it is so very hard for us to adjudicate in this life because we often don’t love goodness, and we really, really don’t walk humbly with God.
Word came today that Australia’s Cardinal George Pell has been released from prison after having had his 2018 sexual assault convictions unanimously overturned by that nation’s highest court. He has steadfastly maintained his innocence throughout two trials, the first resulting in a mistrial:
He was alleged to have sexually assaulted two choir boys while he was Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996.
[…]
While Cardinal Pell was, for many, the face of Catholicism in Australia, and was much maligned after an Australian government enquiry revealed decades of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and other institutions, Cardinal Pell insisted that his ordeal should have been limited to the allegations against him.
“My trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church; nor a referendum on how Church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of peadeophilia [sic] in the Church.”
“The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes and I did not.”
Pell’s administrative culpability, if any, in the wider sex-abuse crisis was not theoretically the focus of the proceedings, as it does not appear he was on trial in his official capacity (the case on appeal is styled “Pell v. The Queen”, not “The Archdiocese of Melbourne v. The Queen”). However, the article suggests that the prosecution was, in fact, intended as a “referendum on the Catholic Church.” Notably, in 2013 “police in Victoria opened Operation Tethering, an open-ended investigation into possible crimes committed by Pell, despite there being no accusations or criminal complaints against him at that time.” Moreover, the circumstances of the abuse ultimately alleged at trial strained credulity, per the High Court. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/cardinal-george-pells-abuse-convictions-overturned-by-australias-high-court-66750 In short, the justices concluded that, “With respect to each of [Pell’s] convictions, there was . . .a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof”. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-07/george-pell-high-court-of-australia-full-judgment-summary/12128468
Even so, a former Australian Prime Minister was quoted as “tweeting” today that the High Court’s ruling calls into question whether the country has “learn[ed] as a nation from the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse”. That sounds an awful lot like using Cardinal Pell as a proxy for the wider Church. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/cardinal-george-pell-walks-free/
Which brings us to the concept of the “scapegoat.”
The “scapegoat” was the animal used by the ancient Israelites on the Day of Atonement to “carry off all their iniquities to an isolated region [in the wilderness].” Lv. 16:22.
It now appears that the truth of the accusations against Cardinal Pell was less important than who Pell was – the most prominent prelate in Australia, dispatched to the wilderness of prison, “scapegoated,” for the iniquities of the Church as a whole.
This disregard for the truth led to injustice, and a man wrongfully imprisoned (in solitary confinement at a maximum-security facility, no less) for more than a year.
While the Pell story played out over the course of years, playing fast and loose with the truth these days can have instant repercussions and lead to an online “flash mob.” Several commentators have noted the scapegoating mechanism at work in the recent fiasco involving students from Covington Catholic High School, who were wrongfully and very publicly accused of disrespecting a Native American and a group of African-Americans at the 2019 March for Life. After a media firestorm of denunciations, it became clear that the students were actually the targets of abuse, not the perpetrators. Several of the students have since sued major media outlets; there has been at least one settlement. https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-covington-nick-sandmann-settlement
Bishop Robert Barron says that watching the abuse of the Covington Catholic students play out online called to mind the scapegoating theories of the late French philosopher René Girard. In Girard’s telling, per Barron,
most human communities, from the coffee klatch to the nation state, are predicated upon this dysfunctional and deeply destructive instinct. Roughly speaking, it unfolds as follows. When tensions arise in a group (as they inevitably do), people commence to cast about for a scapegoat, for someone or some group to blame. Deeply attractive, even addictive, the scapegoating move rapidly attracts a crowd, which in short order becomes a mob. In their common hatred of the victim, the blamers feel an ersatz sense of togetherness. Filled with the excitement born of self-righteousness, the mob then endeavors to isolate and finally eliminate the scapegoat, convinced that this will restore order to their roiled society.
Based on his reading of Girard’s book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Novalis 2001), Rod Dreher also sees the philosopher’s scapegoating theory vindicated in the Covington Catholic story:
Since [the book’s publication], the “radicalization of contemporary victimology” has produced even more of exactly the effects he said they would produce. And orthodox Christianity has become even more marginalized and despised, precisely because the post-Christian left needs a scapegoat upon which to blame the sins of the world. It is hard to come up with a more perfect scapegoat for this pseudo-religion of radical victimology than a group of white male pro-life Catholics from the South, wearing MAGA hats.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/rene-girard-covington-catholic-boys/
We finite creatures do not have the omniscient mind of God. To arrive at judgments, especially those that will impact our fellow human beings, we require evidence which must be tested and scrutinized. It requires courage not to place blame, especially when that blame would be emotionally satisfying, when the evidence is lacking or doesn’t show what we want it to show. So often our courage fails; we lack goodness; we are not humble before God.
The bottom line is this: A concern for the truth (which the “requisite standard of proof” is supposed to safeguard), according to Australia’s High Court, would have spared Cardinal Pell a conviction for sexual assaults he almost certainly did not commit. A concern for the truth would have prevented media outlets from falsely accusing the Covington Catholic students of harassment. The Levitical scapegoat was an animal consigned to the wilderness to assuage the guilt of others. Persons deserve better.
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As horrible as Cardinal Pell’s ordeal was, he did finally get to walk free. And it is important to remember that on the Day of Atonement, the scapegoat, banished to the wilderness though it was, was not sacrificed. (Lv. 16:9.)
This Friday we commemorate the sacrifice of Christ for the salvation of the world. The readings for the observance include Pontius Pilate’s infamous question, “What is truth?” Jn. 18:38. In my next post, I will include Pope St. John Paul II’s reflections on this scene of Jesus before Pilate, drawn from his Good Friday Stations of the Cross of the Jubilee Year 2000.