Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute, author, historian and media commentator has been one of the few to offer a sustained response to the shameful bias of the leftist media on the subject of child sexual abuse. In the following article he brings together his recent criticisms of the media’s persecution of Cardinal George Pell and their manipulation of the findings of The Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

My research in the early 1970s on Catholics and politics in Australia led me to what remained of the Central Catholic Library in Melbourne, which had been established by the Irish-born Jesuit Fr William Hackett. The Central Catholic Library was frequented in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s by the men – and they were all men – who established the Campion Society in Melbourne. It was there that Bob Santamaria met his future wife Helen Power who worked at the library.

B A Santamaria was a pragmatic person. Contrary to what some have claimed, I never believed that he was much influenced by the views of the English distributists such as G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc – but others in the Campion Society, like Frank Maher and Denys Jackson, were. Nor do I believe that Santamaria spent much time reading the historical and cultural studies written by such English Catholic intellectuals as Christopher Hollis, Fr C C Martindale SJ and Christopher Dawson. But, again, others did. Read on…