In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Fri, 25 Apr 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
When the sad news appeared about the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, people were quick to politicize the tragedy with references to his last official duty, a meeting with US Vice President JD Vance.
What about that dossier on abuse that changed hands on Good Friday? It fits an awkward pattern of dossiers and deaths.
Obituaries and commentaries have appeared far and wide. Many of them begin by praising the late Pope's work on climate and the poor and then they go on to politely but firmly express concern that he could have done more for victims of abuse. We need to look at the other Francis.
Walter Francis Pocock
Walter Francis Pocock was born on 28 February 1938. He went to the former St Patrick's college in East Melbourne and then became a Catholic school teacher. He rose through the ranks of schoolteachers to become a headmaster and then he went on to work in administration at the Catholic Education Office (CEO), part of the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
On 28 February 1998, Pope Francis had become Archbishop of Buenos Aires, on the birthday of Walter Francis Pocock. On 28 February 2013, Pope Benedict XVI resigned, creating the opportunity for Pope Francis to become Pope.
The brother of Walter Francis Pocock is my father, who attended Xavier College, one of Australia's most prominent Jesuit schools. Pope Francis was the first Jesuit pope. Dad and his brother both worked at the Catholic Eduction Office.
My uncle died in 2011. One of the most visible parts of his legacy is the work of his daughters. Bernice became a nurse back in the 1990s. She has worked her way up to the top of her profession, becoming the Health Complaints Commissioner for the State of Victoria.
In that role, she personally signs each of the prohibition orders.
Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse published a huge archive of internal documents from the Catholic Church. Looking through those documents, we can see that the church removed fewer abusers in fifty years than Bernice has removed in just two years.
The connections don't stop there of course. Pope Francis had a special relationship with the State of Victoria, having invited Cardinal George Pell, who started his career in Ballarat, to be the treasurer of the Vatican.
Let's have a fresh look at the history and how it intersects with deaths of both Cardinal Pell and Pope Francis.
17 April 2011, the day that Adrian von Bidder died, was both the day that Carla and I married and it was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week.
In December 2018, Cardinal Pell was convicted of abuse, although he was subsequently acquitted on appeal. On one of the most important Christian holidays, the night before Christmas, the Debianists went nuts spreading rumors about my family and abuse. Some of them are still nuts today. Sadly, more of these people have died.
In my last call with Dad, he was clearly disturbed about the Pell situation and the proximity of our family to these matters.
On 17 April 2019, which was Holy Wednesday, the current Archbishop of Melbourne put out a public statement about the grief many people felt throughout the Archdiocese. This was particularly profound for those who worked for the church. People like my father and his brother would see Cardinal Pell in the office from time to time when he was Archbishop of Melbourne. It would have been even more inconvenient for my father as this statement came out on our wedding anniversary.
Dad died on 20 April 2019, which was Easter Saturday.
Pope Benedict died on 31 December 2022, once again, in the Christmas season. Cardinal Pell appeared in news reports and that prompted me to have a fresh look at the evidence and see if I had missed anything.
By pure coincidence, I found myself in the office of the Carabinieri on 10 January 2023, as a witness and survivor talking about the blackmail in Debianism and the similarities to what I observed in the wider context of institutional abuse. I handed over a dossier of approximately 90 pages. Cardinal Pell's name was mentioned somewhere on the first page. I didn't know that the Cardinal was having surgery in the same hour. He died later that evening.
I created a further dossier, a similar size, containing emails from debian-private suggesting that some of the Debian suicides and accidental deaths may have been avoidable. That dossier was sent to the Cambridgeshire coroner on 9 September 2023, the first day of DebConf23. In the middle of the conference, Abraham Raji died in an avoidable accident. I had mentioned Cardinal Pell's name in the email to the coroner and it appears again inside the dossier.
This year, in March 2025, I published a blog pointing out the connection between Adrian von Bidder's death and Palm Sunday. The anniversary of the death was Holy Thursday, the day that Judas betrayed Jesus at the last supper. I previously wrote a blog about that phenomena too.
At the same time as publishing the blog about Palm Sunday, I had been preparing a new dossier about the intersection of the abuse crisis with the health system. It dealt with the cases I'm familiar with, mental health patients, the military, a priest using my name and the remarkable similarities that have emerged in modern-day cults like Debianism.
Pope Francis is featured on the final page, along with the Swiss Guard. The name of Cardinal Pell was repeated forty seven times in this dossier. I included a couple of pictures of the late Cardinal Pell, in one of them he is holding a galero and in another he is wearing his zucchetto and staring at Shadow Man.
The draft was handed over to an expert in the French health system on Good Friday, the day that Jesus was crucified.
Three dossiers, three deaths.
Like my father, I also graduated from the Jesuit school Xavier College.
Some of the dossier is confidential so I'm only going to share the pages with the conclusion. Even that had to be redacted. Nonetheless, it is telling that I used a quote from Ian Lawther about his Fair dinkum letter to the Pope. The letter is published on the web site of the Parliament of Victoria. The letter was dated 24 April 2008 and it appears to have been sent two days later, 26 April 2008. 26 April 2025 is the funeral of Pope Francis.
Ian Lawther's letter is a chilling indictment on the culture of many institutions, this is not only about the crisis in the Catholic Church. Reading this paragraph:
You were not the one who had to take your son to hospital at 2.30 in the morning, because he had broken three bones in his hand, in a fit of anger and guilt, because his mind had been so poisoned, that the priest was able to convince him everything was his fault.
I couldn't help thinking about the way people are being brainwashed in groups like Debian and GNOME. For example, look at how Dr Norbert Preining was brainwashed to write a self-deprecating public confession. Look at the discussions around GNOME this week, for example, Tobias Bernard writes nobody involved is against Codes of Conduct, in other words, victims can't see that amateur-hour Codes of Conduct are nothing more than a tool for denouncing, dividing and silencing people. When people put these amateur hour Codes of Conduct on a pedestal, the victims end up tying themselves in nots. There have been a number of unexplained suicides in the open source software ecosystem and I can't help wondering if some of those people had been shamed with Code of Conduct gaslighting. Look at the horrible message they sent to my last Outreachy intern, it took three months before she told me what they were doing to her.
Read the final pages of the dossier that changed hands on Good Friday.
Can we say JD Vance is off the hook?
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.
Fact check
- 2023-01-10 (Cardinal Pell's surgery): receipt from Carabinieri from first dossier about working conditions
- 2023-09-09 (DebConf23): email to Cambridgeshire coroner with dossier about avoidable deaths
- 2025-04-18 (Good Friday): final pages of dossier about the similarities in the cultures and some known incidents
Did the Debianists graffiti Dr Jacob Appelbaum's home when they were falsifying abuse accusations against him?
Compare the graffiti to the signature on real abuse cases: the prohibition orders.
When Debianists and social media addicts make stuff up, it makes it harder to believe real victims.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █
