The Pell haters are all at See

As Andrew Bolt headlines:

Shock report in Italy's prestigious Corriera della Sera: documents linked to Cardinal Angelo Becciu, fired last week for corruption, show $1.1 million was sent to Australia to people so far unnamed.

The transaction took place at the time of Pell's trial. Of course it did. The Cardinal himself is all over this. The estimable Edward Pentin notes:

Several sources have said Cardinal Pell, who returned to Rome on Wednesday, has conducted his own investigation into possible links between Vatican officials and false allegations against him of sexual abuse, and that his findings will also be part of any upcoming hearing.

The Register asked the cardinal if he could confirm he had made his own inquiries but he declined to comment "at this stage."

Pentin confirms the original Italian media story:

… according to Msgr. Alberto Perlasca - a Secretariat of State official who worked under Cardinal Becciu during the period from 2011 to 2018 when the cardinal served as the Secretariat of State's sostituto (its deputy secretary of state) - Cardinal Becciu was known to "use journalists and contacts to discredit his enemies."

"It is precisely in this vein that the payment in Australia would have been made, possibly in connection with Pell's trial," the article claimed.

The newspaper stated in the article that it had not obtained confirmation that Cardinal Becciu was personally responsible for the Australian bank transfer, or who the beneficiaries of the transaction were, and consequently was investigating these matters further.

A Vatican source with detailed knowledge of the matter confirmed the contents of the Corriere della Sera report to the Register on Oct. 2, and the existence of the bank transfer to Australia. "The year and date of the transfer are recorded in the archives of the Secretariat of State," the source said.

Like any good historian who poses the questions who, when and why, such a journalist might want to do a little digging, not least of all to find out who owned that bank account. My guess, and possibly Andrew Bolt's, is that the account was opened at a bank branch south of the Murray and north of Bass Strait.

What would be far worse than a bunch of ex- and anti-Catholic feminists, corrupt police, priest chasing lawyers and their twitterati boosters (like Lyndsay Farlow), sad and revengeful abuse survivor groups and bungling, clueless magistrates and judges all doing their bit to hound an innocent prelate, would be if someone in that mix or outside it was getting illicit Roman money to drive the witch-hunt and to ensure its success.

As George Pell himself told Andrew Bolt, a number of high up people in the Vatican firmly believe that links from Rome to Melbourne were not merely possible, but rather were inevitable. And it isn't only Vatican observers who suspect this. Kathy Clubb has outlined the case at Family Life International.

The American author and columnist Rod Dreher agrees there must be a connection:

In 2014, Pell was given by Pope Francis responsibility for cleaning up the infamously corrupt Vatican Bank. When that news broke, I thought, "They'll find some way to take him out. They won't let him do it." When the child abuse charges were brought against Pell in 2017, I thought, "So that's how they did it."

And it might just be another mafia embedded in Rome that had Pell in its sights. No less controversial a figure than Milo Yiannopoulos has weighed in: