Three things

- Something that touched me, from Andrew Sullivan's blog ...... A survivor of the Oklahoma tornado gets a surprise: ...



- Cardinal Pell, the enemy of conscience, the master of the reviled missal translation, and sadly one of Pope Francis' choices to help reform the church, has admitted in testimony that the church in Australia covered up sex abuse ...

[...] He admitted his church had covered up abuse for fear of scandal; that his predecessor Archbishop Little had destroyed records, moved paedophile priests from parish to parish and facilitated appalling crimes. He agreed Little’s behavior was reprehensible, not Christlike.

“Did you ever transfer a priest about whom you knew there were allegations of child abuse?” asked pugnacious former journalist and deputy chair of the committee, Frank McGuire.

“I don’t believe I did. I never meant to. I don’t believe I did. And therefore I’m quite happy to say I didn’t.”

“Did you in any way cover up offending?”

“No.”

“Were you guilty of wilful blindness?’’

“I certainly wasn’t.”

But as archbishop of Melbourne he had, he conceded, continued to pay a stipend to Father Ronald Pickering who vanished to England in 1993 after child abuse allegations began to be made. Pickering refused to assist the police, refused to help the church insurers and refused to come back to Melbourne to face the music. But Pell kept paying his “frugal” allowance.

“As long as a priest is a priest,” he explained to the committee, “canon law requires a bishop to support them.” Pell’s successor, Archbishop Denis Hart stopped the payment and initiated an investigation in Pickering’s old parish to see if there were other victims. Pell regretted not having done so himself: “It was far from perfect.”

As the cardinal sees it, the problem is not a culture of abuse in the church but a culture of silence. “I’ve sometimes said, if we’d been gossips – which we weren’t – and we had talked to one another about the problems that were there we would have realised earlier just how widespread this awful business was.”

That was said mid-afternoon. But an hour or so later as the light was failing, Pell faced the last of his interrogators, an angry Catholic barrister, David O’Brien. In a few lethal moments, the National party parliamentarian had the cardinal admitting that the machinery he put in place to deal with abuse when he became archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, involved “no systemic investigation”. ....

Watch the really chilling video on Pell here at ABC News.

- Finally, some music from tonight's episode of Fringe ...