(ANSA) - Rome, July 20 - An Australian cardinal leading
efforts to clean up Vatican finances has courted controversy
again - after a much-criticised stance on sex abuse - by chiding
Pope Francis for his landmark encyclical on climate change.
George Pell, who last year likened a typical victim of sex
abuse to hitchhikers, and the Church to the truck they happened
to have taken, told the Financial Times that the Church had "no
particular expertise in science".
Pell told the Financial Times the church had "no particular
expertise in science".
"The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce
on scientific matters," he said, adding "we believe in the
autonomy of science."
Pell's comments came a month after Francis released his
historic encyclical, 'Laudato si', calling on humanity to fight
global warming.
"We do need to slow down and look at reality in a
different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable
progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and
the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of
grandeur," the pope wrote.
"The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes
a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a
sustainable and integral development, for we know that things
can change."
The 192-page document, whose English title is Praise Be to
You: On Care for Our Common Home, calls on humanity to be more
motivated and to improve education to save the environment.
"The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more
like an immense pile of filth," Pope Francis wrote.
"The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant
for all.
"At the global level, it is a complex system linked to
many of the essential conditions for human life.
"A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are
presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic
system."
Pell is a well-known climate change skeptic.
He was appointed to reform the Vatican's finances nearly
18 months ago.
Last August Pell enraged survivors of clerical sex
abuse by comparing the Vatican to a trucking company that could
not be blamed if a driver molested a hitchhiker.
Pell made the remark while testifying via videolink from
Rome to an Australian probe into historic abuse and alleged
cover-ups when he was Melbourne archbishop in the 1990s.
Saying it would not be appropriate for legal culpability to
be "foisted" on church leaders, he drew an analogy between the
Catholic Church and a trucking company, citing a hypothetical
example of a case involving a woman who was molested by a truck
driver.
"It would not be appropriate, because it's contrary to the
policy, for the ownership, leadership of that company to be held
responsible," Cardinal Pell said.
"Similarly with the church and the head of any other
organisation.
"If every precaution has been taken, no warning has been
given, it is, I think, not appropriate for legal culpability to
be foisted on the authority figure.
"If in fact the authority figure has been remiss through
bad preparation [or] bad procedures or been warned and done
nothing or [done something] insufficient, then certainly the
church official would be responsible."
Nicky Davis from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by
Priests (SNAP) was in the audience of the royal commission
during Cardinal Pell's comments.
She said the truck analogy left the audience "open mouthed
in shock".
"We were literally saying to each other, 'Did he really
just say that?'," she said.
"He shows that he really has absolutely no conception of
what is appropriate or inappropriate behaviour and what are
appropriate or inappropriate things to say to survivors.
Dr Cathy Kezelman from Adults Surviving Child Abuse said
the "outrageous" and "appalling" analogy could do a lot of
damage.
"The victims are already in this process of being
repeatedly traumatised. To have their experiences denied yet
again...drives a knife into the wound and twists it yet again,"
she said.
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