Two risky opinions

Wrongs suffered by individuals are far less important than those affecting multitudes.  But, humanly, they can rouse more emotion and appear more newsworthy.  There has been enormous attention in the past several days for two cases which seem, to me, possible miscarriages of justice.  I may be in a minority of a very few, and I may be wrong.

Shamima Begun, aged fifteen, born in Britain to parents of Bangladeshi origin, was one of three schoolgirls who in February 2015 vamoosed to Syria in order to join the Islamic State extremists.  She was married to a Dutchman who had converted to Islam, bore two babies that died, and was pregnant with a third when she was found by a journalist this February in a refugee camp.  All she wanted was to go home to her family in Britain.  But the home secretary of the Conservative British government, Sajid Javid, who is of Pakistani descent, was “furiously” determined that he would strip her of her British citizenship; she could not re-enter, and, with or without her days-old son, would have to go to Pakistan – where she had never been and which refused to have her.  By British law, a person may not be deprived of citizenship if that would make her stateless.  More than a hundred other such misguided Isis volunteers had already returned to Britain; Shamima was treated differently, as she realized too late, because she had let herself be interviewed and thus made prominent.  I tend to think:  What bomb-throwing danger can be posed by this girl, surely traumatized by three years in a war zone, cumbered with a newborn and doomed to remain in the public eye?  Isn’t it better to welcome back the repentant than to give them cause for hatred?  Yet, according to a poll, a large majority of Britons enthusiastically back “the Saj.”  Only a few agree that he is “pandering to populism” and that “Mercy is a sign of strength.”

Cardinal George Pell, Australian, was treasurer of the Vatican, friend of the pope, and “third most powerful” Catholic.  He is now in custody, in solitary confined for 23 hours a day, while awaiting sentencing on March 13, after which he will almost certainly go to prison.  Denying guilt, he returned to Australia voluntarily – there being no extradition treaty from the Vatican – and after a trial behind closed doors was convicted, by unanimous verdict of a jury, of sexual assaulting two thirteen-year-old Melbourne cathedral choirboys, “some time in the second half of 1996.”  One of the two died in 2014, after telling his mother he had never been sexually abused; so the evidence against Pell was solely the testimony of the other.  According to this unnamed complainant’s memory, the two boys slipped out of the choir procession as it was leaving at the end of mass, sneaked into the sacristy, where for a lark they drank some of the communion wine.  Pell, who had become archbishop of Melbourne in August of that year and had announced a new policy against sexual abuse, appeared in the room, pulled his robe up and his pants down, grabbed one boy by the head and forced his penis into the boy’s mouth, and after a few seconds, still standing, did the same to the other boy, the complainant, also holding that boy’s penis.  The complainant told no one of this till 2015.  The judge instructed the jury that the onus of proof was on the prosecution and Pell should be found guilty only if there was no reasonable doubt.  I had a feeling that the writers of the newspaper stories may have found them as incredible as I did but could not yet venture to say so.  The prosecution’s case was mainly that the complainant seemed honest, and that he could not have known the furnishing details inside the sacristy unless he had once been in it.  The defending barrister mentioned many improbabilities, such as that that the archbishop was always surrounded by people after a service and the sacristy would have been “a hive of activity,” and that there was nothing to stop one of the boys running away; one he didn’t mention was:  What about the boys’ teeth?  Pell is probably a domineering man, or was before he had his heart and knee conditions.  He had been tasked by the pope with rooting out corruption in the Catholic world; could he have been framed by an enemy?  But no one is daring to say so; there has been too great a wave of indignation about paedophilia and sexual harassment worldwide and particularly that rife in the celibate Catholic priesthood.  I will not be surprised – or perhaps I will – if Pell is cleared on appeal.

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