Cardinal Pell may be being railroaded.

You may have heard lots of joy from antiCatholics about Cardinal Pell of Australia being convicted of molesting a teenage boy.

What you haven't heard is that it's very likely Pell is innocent.

If he is guilty of course we're all happy he was convicted but based on the evidence that we have there's a very good chance he's innocent.

First thing to note is that he was tried twice for the same charge.  The first trial ended in a hung jury.  After that trial there was a media frenzy during which the jurors for the second trial, who hadn't been selected yet, were subjected to nonstop media claims that Pell was guilty making it effectively impossible for Pell to get a fair trial.

Even the Pell hating Australian government is acknowledging that since the Attorney General for the State of Victoria, where Pell was tried, has suggested the law be amended to allow for a bench trial by a judge in cases like this.

Secondly there is a lot of evidence that indicates that Pell is innocent.

For known offenders it's insanely rare that they will molest a teenage boy once or twice and then never do it again.  Yet despite years of investigation only one boy has come forward to accuse Pell of having molested him; and even he says Pell only did so on two occasions decades ago.  Real molesters like McCarrick have multiple accusations spanning their entire lives.

The lone accuser said that the second time Pell molested him and another boy.  The problem is that the other boy, who died of a drug overdose, told his mother that Pell had never molested him.

That's credible because given the specifics of the accusation against Pell a large number of people have said that it couldn't have happened.  Pell never ducked out of the middle of a procession--something that hundreds of people would have noticed-- nor was he ever alone as the accuser says he was.  If you're not Catholic you may not realize that a Bishop, what Pell was at the time decades ago that the supposed abuse occurred, is a big deal. When he's at a church there are always people around him just as if the CEO of a company shows up at an office; it's unbelievable that Pell could have been alone for the extended periods of time the accuser claims he was.

Further unlike molesters like McCarrick Pell actually cleaned up the cover up culture in Australia and treated molesters with severity.

The accuser can't specify on what date the alleged assault occurred only that it was within the span of a few months and that it was after 10:30 Mass.  However Pell was only at that Mass twice in the period that the accuser identified. On one of those two occasions witnesses place Pell with guests immediately after Mass.  On the other occasion the Choir, in which the accuser and the other boy who the accuser claimed was also abused performed, met immediately after Mass to practice for a recording of their Christmas performance and if two of the boys were missing it would have been immediately noticed.

Witnesses also stated that the physical layout of the church didn't conform to the accusers narrative and that Pell needed help removing the vestments he wore at Mass which would have made it unlikely that Pell could have done what the accuser claims he did.

Given these massive issues and the fact that the entire case was he said he said, there was only one accuser who had no corroborating witnesses, the fact that the jury found Pell guilty is most likely due to the idea pushed by the left that by definition all Catholic priests are guilty unless they can prove beyond any doubt that they're not.

Given that the #FakeNews media has been lying about the Church and sexual abuse for a long time it's not surprising that jurors might think that way.  While it's true that 4% of American Catholic priests have been accused of abusing minors over the last 70 years or so the #FakeNews media has skewed people's perceptions by exaggerating the problem--all priests are molesters--and by concealing from the public that adult males in general are far more likely to molest kids than Catholic priests. For example how often have you heard that according to the US government 10% of all public school students will be sexually molested by their teachers?  Did you know that while the Pennsylvania Grand Jury found 300 accusations against Catholic priests covering a span of 70 years--of which only 2 were about events that allegedly occurred in the last 33 years-- there are hundreds of accusations of sexual molestation against Pennsylvanian public school teachers every year?

The Church did have a problem decades ago but by the 1990s it had mostly fixed the problem but the public schools have had the problem for decades and they have done little or nothing to fix it.

Does that mean that there haven't been Catholic priests, mostly gay ones, who molest kids?  No but it shows that the #FakeNews media created perception, which is what probably got Pell convicted, is that the Church is a hot bed of child molesters and that child molestation is unique to the Church.

To find out the real story about the Church and child molestation check out this article.