A top cardinal’s sex-abuse conviction is huge news in Australia. But the media can’t report it there.

By Margaret Sullivan
December 12 at 4:41 PM

The front page of Thursday’s Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, is dominated by a single word in huge white type, all caps, on a black background: CENSORED.

“The world is reading a very important story that is relevant to Victorians,” reads the subhead. “The Herald Sun is prevented from publishing details of this significant news. But trust us. It’s a story you deserve to read.”

The story is, indeed, a blockbuster, especially for Australian citizens: Cardinal George Pell, sometimes described as the third-most-powerful Vatican official, was convicted of all charges that he sexually molested two choirboys in Australia in the late 1990s. (Pell, 77, has been the Vatican’s chief financial officer in recent years; he earlier was the archbishop of Sydney and of Melbourne.)

But because of a court-issued gag order intended to preserve impartiality, the news media has been forbidden from publishing news in Australia on the details of the Melbourne trial, and now on the unanimous decision of the jury.

Suppression orders — almost unheard of in the United States — are fairly common in Australia. But they are true anachronisms in the digital age, where information, thankfully, can’t be shut up in a padlocked barn.

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