All Roads Lead to Rome and to Disappointment – Part 10 of Gumshoe’s Royal Commission Series

By Mary W Maxwell

Before the long Christmas break, there was quite a buzz at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. See, for example the testimony by ex-police detective Denis Ryan (who was the subject of Part 7 of this series). It was finally starting to come out that higher-ups did know, for 30 years, and blocked the resolving of, the problem of pedophilia.

Eyes then turned to Cardinal Pell, who today is a director of finance at the Vatican and who had served as archbishop of Australia’s two largest dioceses, first Melbourne, then Sydney.

Thanks in part to Tim Minchin’s song “Come Home, Cardinal Pell,” money was raised for ten or more survivors (middle-aged persons who were abused within the church as children) to travel to Rome. They have been allowed to sit in the room where Pell is giving video-link sworn testimony to the Royal Commission.

Three hours ago the hearings opened. I realize I am jumping the gun by expressing disappointment so soon. Below, I’ll quote some of the Q&A. Maybe it is a build-up to some hard-hitting questions, but I doubt it.

There is no need, in my opinion, for the Commission to go over every detail of where Pell was located when some of the pedophilia was happening. For instance, he was in Swan Hill, as his first parish after ordination in 1971.

The Commission this morning has been quizzing His Eminence about an article of the Melbourne Observer in 1972. Q. “Was this the first occasion on which it came to your attention that a priest had been accused of sexual offenses?” A. “It certainly would have been one of the first and perhaps the first.”

Testimony Too Slow

If we are going to have to listen to a parade of Pell’s learning about pedophilia for the next 30 years (the Church’s Melbourne Response was formed in 2007), this is going to be too tedious.

If I were on the Commission I would ask, “Cardinal, it is the mission of this RC to find out why the institutions of Australian society made it hard – actually impossible in most cases – for children who were suffering at the hands of pedophiles, to get grown-ups to take action to stop this behavior. So let’s get down to it. What is this really all about?”

Instead we have this:

“When you were assistant priest from 1973 did you know Brother Dowlan who was at the school, Brother Farrell, Brother Fitzgerald, and the brother with pseudonym, CCK?”  “Yes.”  “Did anyone come to you about him?”

“There was talk about the eccentricity of Fitzgerald.”  “What showed him to be eccentric?”  “It was alleged he gave the boys a kiss.”  “Did u see this as sexualized behavior?”  “No, and it was common knowledge that it was harmless enough.”

“Given your role as priest and him being a Christian Brother, there was nothing you could do, right?” “I had no jurisdiction.”  The principal and the parish priest were… probably aware?”  “Yes that is a reasonable assumption.”

— etc.

The Royal Commission had been already completed 3 years of hearings, submission, and analyses. I would speed things up (recalling that it took a lot of doing to get Pell to be sitting here today in front of camera). Instead we have this:

“I heard there were problems at St Pat’s.” “What sort of problems?”  “Unspecified, harsh discipline, possibly other infractions.” “Do you mean of a sexual nature? Who did you hear that from?”  “Once again, it’s difficult to recall accurately. I could have heard it from one or two of the students, and  certainly one or two of the priests mentioned that there were problems.”  “And they were described  to you?”  “None were described to me.”

“It could only have been sexual with minors?” “Yes.”  “Did you do anything with that information?”  “It was unspecific, I mentioned it to the school chaplain, that there is talk about problems with Dowlan. I asked is there any truth in them? He said Yes there are discipline problems but I think that the Brothers have got the matter in hand.”

“Did you know if students had approached others?” “One of the lads said Dowlan was misbehaving, no they didn’t say they went to the principal.” “Was the principal Nangle? Did you have a lot to do with that school?  “Eventually I had quite a bit to do with him.”  “In what context?”   “I eventually coached rowing, I attended the speech nights….”

“What about [Brother Dowlan’s] misbehaviors?” “I did not know whether they were indiscretions or crimes. I concluded he must have been at the very minimum unwise and imprudent.”

I Quit

Although I want to give Gumshoe readers information about the RC, especially now that it is the longed-for day of questioning Pell, I’m afraid I have decided to turn off the computer and not listen to these meaningless questions. They are meaningless in view of Detective Denis Ryan’s clear statement that within the police department he could not get anyone to help the children.

It is obvious that what was said by this or that priest is not going to enlighten us. After all, if the bishops had been responsibly calling the authorities in those days, the civil authorities would have let them down, right?  So says Ryan and I believe him.

Meanwhile I’ve read an article by James Shanahan at pedophilesdownunder.com, stating that he gave testimony about ritual abuse more than a year ago to the RC and no police action has followed. That is outrageous.

Ritual abuse is a bad as you can get. Please see Wendy Hoffman’s stunning 2014 book Enslaved Queen, that tells of her life in New York (born 1943) with regular visits from Josef Mengele. Yes, the most famous torturer in the Nazi concentration camps was able, with Vatican help, to get passage to the US.

I feel that Fiona Barnett’s 6-minute video clip is too shocking to include in this article, for the uninitiated. I will link it in a Comment below. She claims, and I believe her, that in the town of Engadine, NSW, she saw – indeed participated in – many ritual murders (“ritual” in the sense of rite or ceremony).

My Canadian friend Trish Fotheringham provides a helpful 45-page article at her website (morethananidea.ca), entitled “Patterns of Mind Control” that gives technical information about the advanced neuroscience used in producing split-off alter personalities. No neuroscientist can afford to miss this.

Written by a victim with a great memory!  She says:

When I was still only twelve years old, the dark blue and black path soldier shutdown involved a series of incidents in which, while drugged with LSD, I had to endure a “final survival skills exam” in a forested section of a local military shooting range/training ground. The staged event brought “failure”, beatings and interrogation as a “prisoner of the enemy”, then escape when I used self-defense training against other “soldiers” (children like me!). Then I was captured, given the label “traitor”, and forced to undergo more interrogation with a shocking gang rape.

As I hinted in my November 2015 Youtube video, “The Royal Commission and the Shoplifter,” I think we need to open up this RCto find what we really need to find — the running of the pedophile rings by the taxpayer-paid intelligence agencies.  This is worldwide but Oz could be the place to crack it open.

As to the Royal Commission’s  responsibilities, why does this law maxim come to mind:

Suppressio veri, expressio falsi.  (Suppression of the truth is equivalent to false representation.)

— Mary W Maxwell lives in Adelaide and is very interested in the Fiona Barnett revelations which accord with what she knows from the US and Canada. Mary is co-author with Dee McLachlan of “Truth in Journalism” (2015).