The Strange Case of the Cardinal and Billy the Kid

Modern reconstruction of 'The Kid' (as gay icon) based on actual photos.

Cardinal George Pell is the highest ranking Catholic clergyman yet to be convicted of historic sex crimes. Earlier this year he was found guilty of tampering with an altar boy in the early 2000s in broad daylight after a service in a cathedral in Melbourne, Victoria. To say the least it is a high profile case, and there is no need to recount all the grisly details here since there has been saturation coverage of it in both Australian and international media. As of this writing, however, an appeal is pending, to be heard in June, and so - legally speaking - it is not over yet. The Cardinal is in jail waiting for the hearing. 

There are many extraordinary and indeed downright strange features of the case which, on the surface, appears highly irregular. For a start, the Victorian police established a "task force" to pursue the Cardinal before any charges had been laid, or in fact before any accusers had come forward. That is to say the police went on a fishing expedition, seeking accusers against a man they had already decided was guilty of something. Then there is the substance of the accusations which, on the face of it, seem extremely improbable. As numerous reputable commentators and lawyers have argued in the public forum it would seem almost physically impossible for the incident to have occurred as the accuser claims. There are claims the Cardinal has been subject to a witch hunt and that, given the media campaigns against him prior to the case, it was not possible for him to receive a fair trial. Not in the state of Victoria - that Albania of the southern hemisphere. Still, he was found guilty beyond reasonable doubt by a jury of his peers, and the jury heard all the (admissible) evidence and people outside the courtroom, including me, did not. The transcripts and evidence of the case has not been released at this time. I am certainly not in a position to proclaim his innocence - for all I know he could be a pervert of the first order. But there is cause to think that something is a little bit fishy. 

One dimension of the case is especially fascinating. It goes like this: several years prior to the alleged crime a case in the United States was reported in Rolling Stone magazine which bears a truly uncanny similarity to what it is said the Cardinal did. That case involved a boy named "Billy" who claimed that, after a church service, he was forced to have oral sex with a clergyman (in broad daylight, in a church packed with people) in circumstances almost exactly the same as those Cardinal Pell's accuser claims. In fact, the two cases have so many parallels that it would seem to defy the laws of chance. In both cases it is claimed that two boys were caught helping themselves to wine in the sacristry and that the clergyman who caught them took advantage of the situation and demanded oral sex. The general shape of the similarities has been documented by the Australian journalist Keith Windshuttle as follows:

*Both cases of sexual abuse occurred in the sacristy after Sunday Mass.
*In both cases, the victims had been drinking wine they found in the sacristy.
*Both boys assisted in the celebration of the Mass.
*The priest fondled both boys’ genitals.
*Both boys were made to kneel before the priest.
*Both boys were made to perform fellatio on the priest.
*Both the alleged victims were the only witnesses who testified for the prosecution in court; it was their word against that of the priests.

It should also be added that in the Pell case the second boy - a man now deceased - withdrew the accusation and categorically said the incident did not take place and that he made it up. The other boy proceeded with the accusation, and Pell was subsequently found guilty: his word against the boy, with no witnesses. The complicating factor in Pell's case was that as an Archbishop he was fully clad in an extensive array of liturgical robes yet, miraculously, managed to produce his penis from under the floor-length garments (this is the bit that has been demonstrated to be almost physically impossible without at least partially disrobing, and no one says he disrobed.)

This is where it goes pear-shaped. There are now suggestions that the testimony against Cardinal Pell has been lifted, in whole or in part, from the Rolling Stone report. It has been suggested that the Cardinal's accuser(s) either read of that case or heard that case from others who had read the Rolling Stone report and crafted their accusations accordingly. The similarities are uncanny, but it is, of course, not out of the question that miscreant clergy in the US and Australia acted similarly in similar situations. Perhaps it is standard practice among miscreant priests everywhere to extract sexual penance from boys caught swigging the altar wine? 

But one detail emerges that must make you wonder. The boy in the Rolling Stone report was, as already noted, referred to as "Billy" or "Billy Doe" - not his real name. Now an Australian journalist from the ABC - an organisation renowned for its anti-Catholic bias, and its often fevered hatred of Cardinal Pell in particular - quickly wrote up a book about the case called Cardinal: the Rise and Fall of George Pell (not a very original title, no, but there you go.) Since the boy in the Pell case is also protected from having his real name made public, the journalist Louise Milligan (there's a good Irish Catholic name!) was obliged to give him a pseudonym, and for this she chose the curious designation "The Kid" with an upper-case T and an upper-case K. Her whole account is about what the evil Cardinal did to "The Kid". Why she chose this monicker, I do not know, and she may have a good reason for doing so, although it seems a strange choice in any circumstances. Children are called "kids" in Australia, as elsewhere, but that is not what she meant. She meant "The Kid" in all its upper-case glory. 

So, on top of the general parallels between the two cases, we have this curious detail: in one case we have "Billy" and in the uncannily parallel case in Australia we have "The Kid". And thus, by any popular resonance, we are drawn to the name and character of "Billy the Kid". Who else but Billy the Kid could be evoked by the name "The Kid"? And yet, in Milligan's book there is no evidence that she knew of or was in any way alluding to the earlier American parallel. Indeed, as Mr Windshuttle is careful to note, as far as he knows the journalist in question had no knowledge of the case of "Billy" and so it would seem to be just a very odd coincidence. 

What Windshuttle fails to mention, but which is perhaps relevant to this oddness, is that the famous outlaw "Billy the Kid" is today celebrated as a gay icon - as we see in the picture at the top of this page, and here in full:

In fact, you can find celebrations of "The Kid" - the outlaw, that is - throughout gay literature (and even, unsurprisingly, in gay porn, soft and hard.) The relevance of this is that Cardinal Pell has long been a target - loathed and despised - by the Australian gay 'community' or, as detractors would have it, the Australian gay mafia. The further background to this is that Cardinal Pell was a vociferous opponent of same-sex marriage throughout the recent public debates on that subject, which enraged the 'community', even more so since that 'community' has long maintained that the Cardinal was a well-known closet homosexual and a hypocrite of epic proportions. There are long-standing claims that the Cardinal was an active homosexual (just like half the upper clergy of the Church) and that he enraged gay activists by his public stand against gay marriage and his general public position on homosexuality. Again, the Cardinal may well by a practising homosexual (with a penchant for altar boys) for all I know, but there is no denying that his public face attracted the ire of gay activists who have hated him with a passion and who have been gunning for him for years. 

One wonders, therefore, if the name "The Kid" might not have certain resonances in the gay subculture that are lost on the rest of us. Louise Milligan is an award-winning - but thoroughly Leftist - journalist who has specialised in cases of child abuse by Catholic clergy, and her pro-gay, anti-Catholic leanings are evident throughout her work. Her place in Australian culture wars is plain to see. Her opponents accuse her of factual errors and lurid fabrications in what is seen as a Crusade against the Catholic establishment. She's a Left-wing darling, but to others an activist hack. I personally don't bother with her work, or the work of almost any journalist from the ABC these days, but I'm no position to rubbish it in specific instances. The whole business is tiresome, to be honest, and well outside of my interests. 

But I am interested in strange coincidences, and the conflation of names, Billy + The Kid, in this case is one of them. In fact, it becomes even more interesting to me if there is really no connection. Such things happen, both in history and in life. It is all quite curious, isn't it? The Cardinal, as I say, may well be a pervert, or at least a raging hypocrite, and he may well be guilty (the jury thought so), or he may well have been stitched up by the gay mafia acting in concert with the Victorian police - believe me, I am no fan of the Victorian police! The case against Pell may be well-founded, or it may be somehow lifted from the uncannily parallel case reported in the Rolling Stone magazine (of which I'm also not a fan... and there's more to that that I need not go into here.) I just find the intrusion of Billy the Kid - gay icon - in this tangle quite fascinating. 

Harper Mc Alpine Black