A sharepic with a cardinal in the picture shocks many people. Is the cardinal's quote correct?

The sharepic shows Cardinal George Pell, who was accused of sexual abuse. Below his picture a sentence that is attributed to him. This sentence states that abortion is “a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people.”

Pell is described here as “the third-highest-ranking official in the Vatican who is currently facing multiple child abuse charges.” This is the following sharepic:

It's not often that sharepics, especially when they contain scandalous messages, are completely accurate. In this case the graphic is correct in all respects. Pell made the infamous statement during a World Youth Day event in July 2002 in response to an American minister's question about how Catholics should respond to questions about the findings of systematic sexual abuse by church officials.

When asked to explain his reasons, Pell (who was then the Archbishop of Sydney) said: "Because [abortion] is always a destruction of human life. ”) ( compare ).

Snopes results

fellow fact-checkers have looked into this case thoroughly. In their analysis article, Pell claimed the following month that, although his condemnation of sexual abuse was not mentioned in the original coverage of his comment, he would not backtrack on the original statement:

I mentioned that the Church is sometimes attacked by elements that are a little anti-Christian…. I said there are other scandals, like abortion, that are underreported, and because abortion destroys innocent lives, you could say it is a worse scandal.

(I … mentioned that the church is being attacked for [sex abuse] sometimes by elements that are a bit anti-Christian … I said there are other scandals, such as abortion which are under-reported and because abortion destroys innocent lives you could say it's a worse scandal.)

On February 24, 2014, Pell (who was a cardinal at the time) was appointed by Pope Francis to head the newly created Secretariat for Economic Affairs, which gave Pell "authority over all economic and administrative activities" in the Vatican. He has since been described by multiple news outlets as the Vatican's third-highest official.

Allegations of sexual abuse against Pell date to 2002, when he was accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy in 1961. An investigation commissioned by the National Committee for Professional Standards, a group overseen by Australia's Catholic Church, found the allegations were "unfounded".

But in June 2017, Pell was charged with historical sexual assault, a term used to identify an alleged crime that occurred in the non-recent past. While some of these charges were dismissed, on May 1, 2018, Pell was ordered to stand trial on other cases. He has pleaded not guilty.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
via Snopes


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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )