St George Pell? Now that would be a miracle

Earlier this week I got a warning from my agent that the dataset Library Genesis had been hacked by Meta. “Unfortunately I see many of your works listed,” she warned me, from a roster of the plundered she had read, “perhaps all of them, including translations”.

She urged me to record them on a list of the plundered being gathered by the good old Society of Authors, our chief defence for now. Within an hour of this New-Age and Lost-Old-Person Drama, I was sent a press report on equally baffling matters of medieval import. It was the sort of thing I used to read with a certain sense of wonder in my childhood.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

It was reported that last month, an American couple, convinced that their toddler son had drowned, decided to pray to the late Australian cardinal George Pell for his intercession. The couple, Caitlin and Wes Robinson, had met Pell in November 2021. They had studied Pell’s prison journal and had him to their house for dinner while he was in the US for a book tour. But on Sunday, March 2 this year – more than two years after Pell’s death – they found the youngest of their eight children, Vincent, then 14 months old, unresponsive in a hot tub in their backyard in Phoenix, Arizona. He was not breathing, having been submerged for minutes in the tub.

Vincent arrived at hospital with no pulse. After 52 minutes of resuscitation, he was placed on life support, but his mother and father did not expect he could survive. However, Vincent, to their amazement and that of doctors, was saved. And he has made a full recovery.

To quote the parents, a “miracle happened”. And it is a miracle for which they give credit, among others, to Pell. Sydney’s Archbishop Anthony Fisher found the idea of a Pell miracle credible enough to suggest its reality in public. The Catholic Weekly and The Australian are running with the story, apparently taking the “miracle” seriously.

To hear of a little boy’s survival is a matter of unambiguous celebration. I found it hard, however, to take seriously the claim that it was thanks to Pell’s intercession.

That is because I had recently read an article by Louise Milligan in The Monthly, which nominated a number of Pell’s alleged victims of abuse. Despite Pell’s ultimate acquittal in the case of two alleged victims, I found Milligan’s account compelling. That article would later be removed from copies of the magazine for legal reasons.

In 2018, Pell had been convicted of the oral rape of one 13-year-old choirboy and the molestation of another. However, in 2020, a full bench of the High Court upheld Pell’s appeal and acquitted him, finding “a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt”. In January this year, two men abused by Pell in the 1970s were granted compensation by the federal government’s National Redress Scheme, despite Pell’s acquittal in the separate case.

Nevertheless, here I am, an ex-seminarian like Tony Abbott, sincerely and not opportunistically confronting what I believe to be Pell’s sins. And there is Abbott, my former local member by the way, who at Pell’s funeral hailed him as a “saint of our times”.

I return now to that funeral speech and Abbott’s fierce defence of Pell. And I think: how is it I missed this man whom Abbott sees? For with the greatest will in the world I cannot recognise the man Abbott extols.

Illustration:Credit: Matt Davidson

“It’s the celebration of a wonderful life,” said Abbott, “a once-in-a-generation gathering of the people of faith; to rededicate ourselves to the ideals George Pell stood for; and to draw strength from each other for the struggles ahead.”

Abbott’s devotion to Pell grew white-hot in its fervour. “In the pulpit, from the lectern, on TV, across the dinner table, after Mass, in the confession he was always thoughtful, sometimes imperious, often charismatic, constantly concerned with the wellbeing of others, and a pastoral priest who could find an echo of Christ even in the sinner. In short, he’s the greatest Catholic Australia has produced, and one of our country’s greatest sons.”

I would love to think Abbott was bluffing, but the truth is he was simply being loyal to Pell. Abbott had previously railed against the “snubbing” of Pell in the Order of Australia awards and the “woke, far-left decision-makers who draw up the honours lists”. At the funeral, David Pell, while defending his brother as “falsely accused”, implored “Catholic” commentators (his inverted commas) and others to “rid yourself of the woke algorithm of mistruths, half-truths”.

David Pell’s criticism was not of his brother’s alleged victims. I wonder, though, whether those enumerated by Milligan in The Monthly would consider themselves as “woke”? And if they were, would their “wokeness” alter their truth?

In the law, witnesses are taken on their own terms except in this area of child abuse, when they become ex officio liars wanting to torment a candidate for sanctity – unjustly imprisoned and ultimately released.

Thanks to the welcome survival of a little American named Vincent Robinson, we have not just claims of honour on Pell’s behalf but claims of sanctity. George Pell is a matter of polarities, not of mild contrast. A modern evil called “wokeness” invalidates every victim and explains why they come forward with accusations against Pell?

I cannot reconcile my view of Pell with that of my fellow seminarian Tony Abbot. He believes me wrong as strenuously as I believe him wrong.

Indeed, I thought The Catholic Weekly was trying an April Fool’s trick with this tale, given I first came to it with an article published in The Australian a day later, on April 2.

I know that many contemporary Catholics are ambiguous about the rigmarole of proving miracles to verify sanctity. A neat little package of miracles demonstrates the power of the deity, but only when substantiated by three cases. They answer one question, that of divine omnipotence.

So might George Pell have three miracles? I believe that, rightly or wrongly, most people would find them – as much as we rejoice in the survival of little Vincent of Arizona – too little and too late. Rather, a sign of Pell’s humanity was always the mystery we were looking for. It would have been enough.

So I’m going back to reporting literature thieved from the internet. Somehow that’s more predictable.

Thomas Keneally is an Australian novelist, playwright and essayist.