A bad week for the Pellists ... and the Sydney Anglicans gird their loins for a DADA fight with the new Archbishop of Canterbury ...

(Above: a lolcat or a companion for witches requiring a DADA Defence Against the Dark Arts? The pond merely reports and you decide).

Even by the Pellists' usual bad standards, it's been a bad week for the Pellists.

The Fairfax media, in best tabloid style, have got hold of the St. John's Sydney University college saga by the scruff of its fresher neck, and there's no way they're letting go.

Yesterday the rag was reporting that the fuzz had been called in against the junk (College scandal: police move in), and there were Cracks in the sandstone, and Bazza and Pell were fighting the fire as best they could.

Naturally this being Sun-Herald tabloid day, the paper stayed at the trough with St. John's patron in racial outrage, and a little side-bar Students' social whirl costly, explaining how $18,500 of student money had been spent on cleaning and repair after booze-fuelled events, with the kitty for carousing ending in deficit! And it was exclusive!

Take that Murdoch. Not so exclusive now hey ...

Now it might seem like this is just a jolly hockey sticks story of entitled Sydney lads and their upper-crust, toffy, foolish, insensitive parents, but after all, it's the college that sired - or perhaps spawned - the likes of Tony Abbott and jolly Joe Hockey, and as everyone knows this sort of fragging and fagging and abuse and power-mongering and school bullying (nee traditional family and educational way of life) was all the go way back when.

Do the current misfits reveal anything we can learn about past misfits?

Who knows, but last week Cardinal Pell was scribbling furiously for the Sunday Terror, warning about bad Catholics, and penned these wise words:

What is in the cat comes out in the kitten ...

Indeed, and you'd have to think that what was instilled in the kitten has to come out in the cat. And that pesky church cat has produced more than a few kittens too.

Pell also tried the old trick of shooting the messenger:

... the anti-religious pressures today, especially in the media and entertainment, are formidably strong.

As opposed to the anti-religious practices in the Catholic church? Yep:

In other words, if the parents have little idea about faith and moral principles, then their children will be carried further away by the culture. 

Get your moral principles here, going cheap at colleges and sundry inquiries.

That's moral principles quite different to the ones afflicting genteel souls who recoil from the sight of privileged tossers bullying others, as if giving Billy Bunter a hard time was still all the go.

No wonder Pell was appalled by this tale:

Recently a brother priest recounted a conversation he had with a couple who came along for a Catholic marriage. "Where are you religiously", he asked. "What about your relationship with God?" It is terrific, was the answer. They explained that they never prayed or went to Mass and claimed emphatically that they were not worried by any guilt about sins or wrong doing.

No guilt, no wringing of hands, no suffering, no gloom? Just marriage and enjoying a shared life?

Shocking, flabbergasting, profoundly confused and confusing. Those jokers should learn from Pell, who abased himself exclusively to the readership of The Australian yesterday:

There you go, that's how it's done. Guilt, abasement, deep shame, sinfulness. Confess, and maybe you can go and do a little more sinning, at least if the price and a church peddling indulgences is nearby (For Catholics, a Door to Absolution Is Reopened).

But the tales of vomit and torment and rampant sexuality and defiance and rebellion and Q.C.s at ten paces was only the beginning.

Then there was the whistle-blowing copper who was as mad as hell and wasn't going to take it anymore, and dumped a bucket on the devious ways of the church in relation to pedophilia and its victims, and that sent the NSW government off to arrange an inquiry, trying desperately to limit its impact - never hold an inquiry if you don't know the answer Premier - but which will now allow the affair to keep running and running in N.S.W. (Calls to widen clergy inquiry across state). Comrades Bill Shorten and jolly Joe also sounded nervous about an actual Royal Commission that might turn up all sorts of misdeeds.

You can see why Bazza and Pell are nervous. The old trick of plausible deniability - the notion that Pell only tends to Sydney, others tend their own parishes, and the rest of the rabble report direct to Rome - no longer works, perhaps because Pell has never been short of a word or two when it comes to topics as diverse as climate science and the policies of government. You can't sound like a leader than retreat to the trenches when the going gets tough.

Yesterday Barney Zwartz in The Age - how he loves stories about Catholics - brought the news of the Victorian inquiry up to date in Imported priests pose risk, church abuse inquiry told, and it was a ripper, featuring the thoughts of Dr. Wayne Chamley:

The Australian Catholic Church has not released the number of clerics imported mostly from India, Nigeria and the Philippines to ease the catastrophic decline in parish priests, but a study last year estimated they made up 20 per cent of Australia's total of 1500. 

20%! And the media is agog and inflamed by boat people!

But do go on Dr. Chamley, tell us what you really think:

■ Church lawyers tried to ''king hit'' victims as hard as possible to demoralise them in negotiations for compensation. ''They wring their hands and speak in humble voices, but in the cut and thrust of mediation it's boots and all.''
■ The church's internal system for investigating abuse was a charade that had no legal standing. He said the Melbourne Response's independent commissioner, Peter O'Callaghan, described himself as operating like a royal commission. ''What act of Parliament set that up?'' Dr Chamley said. 
■ Letting the church investigate itself was like ''leaving Dracula in charge of the blood bank''. 

But wait, there's more!

Dr Chamley condemned the submissions to the inquiry by the Salvation Army and Catholic Church. The former, at eight pages, was ''an insult'' to the Parliament and people of Victoria, given the hundreds of child victims of abuse by its officers, and its response to victims was often ''secretive, unco-operative, mean-spirited and legalistic''. 
The Catholic submission was notable for what it left out, including two Australian Senate inquiries that showed ''children who ended up in the 'care' of the Catholic Church were subjected to widespread sexual abuse, procurement for sexual purposes by other adults, severe and unwarranted physical abuse, criminal assault, prolonged solitary confinement, exploitation and unpaid child labour, slavery, starvation, administration of drugs and provision of alcohol'' during most of the past century. 
Dr Chamley compared the life of a paedophile priest who was not exposed despite church payouts with that of his victims. 
The priest would be housed, given medical care, a stipend, and the respect of his family and parishioners, who did not know of his predation. 
Of the victims, 91 per cent had mental health problems. ''They live in public housing, wait in queues at emergency departments in public hospitals for days. Their diets are shocking … and they fear as they get older - and they are now in their 60s - some will develop Alzheimer's and dementia.'' 

Talk about cats and kittens, and a Church rotten to the core.

Well at least the homosexual priest in the pond's family always loathed Pell, and what he'd done in Melbourne, and heaved a sigh of relief when he was sent to Sydney - but hang on, isn't that what they did with other troublesome priests, shipping them about until they could find a refuge?

Never mind, it made the pond turn to the Sydney Anglicans with a similar sigh of relief, if only to read Michael Jenkins explain that it was completely impossible to change - what with original sin and Adam and Eve and all that - unless you talked to and dedicated your life to an imaginary friend.

Now there's change you can believe in ...

Is it possible to change? he asks, seeing this as some kind of Defence against the dark arts.

Well She seems to have done a bloody poor job with the Catholics and the Sydney Anglicans, and getting them to change their wicked, wicked ways, and it's been at the hard slog already these past two thousand years or more (perhaps starting as long ago as 4004 BC if you accept Ussher's chronology for the very real Adam and Eve, and the way she ruined everything, still the Sydney Anglicans' basic guide to the way men and women should relate to each other).

The Anglicans have been squabbling amongst themselves like a pack of disagreeable children or pimple-laden adolescents these past few years, and the surly response of the Jensenists to the appointment of Justin Welby is just a continuation of the homophobia the Sydney Anglicans share with assorted African churches (Gay marriage to define archbishop's appointment):

''We welcome the appointment of Bishop Welby to the ministry of Archbishop of Canterbury. It remains an important role though obviously the events of the last decade have diminished its significance in the worldwide Anglican Communion. 
 ''Bishop Welby has our prayerful support. We look forward to him speaking with clarity from the word of God about the gospel and its impact on the issues confronting the Church in England and the West."

Prayerful support? Speak with clarity? You have to admire the passive aggressive Sydney Anglican way.

That's code for fall into line with Sydney Anglicans or you can bugger off and we'll stick with the bugger-hating Africans, and the West can go suck.

What a bunch of angry splitters and recidivists they are ...

Still it's good to see Sydney Anglicans embracing Harry Potter's core, crucial Hogwarts class D.A.D.A. (a.k.a. Defence against the dark arts - you can wander off into Potter la la land here) and never mind that Potter and witchcraft and wizardry is as sinful as Halloween.

Yes it's Jensen's DADA against Potter's DADA and may the best DADAist win, though since they both have imaginary friends, deciding a winner might be tricky.

The pond is more concerned about the Dadaists, but that's another story ...