Andrew Bolt: What my last phone call with George Pell revealed about him

To his critics Cardinal George Pell was a schemer, but in his last phone call to me from Rome he revealed who he really was.

I sure won’t forget the last time Cardinal George Pell rang me. Not now that I’ll never speak again to this holy man.

He called me one night from Rome with an anxious question: Had I finally answered Christ’s call?

He’d even sent me an unimpressive book by Antony Flew to hasten the conversion he felt was imminent, so I was embarrassed to disappoint him and admit I was still agnostic.

Here’s why his call will stay with me now that he’s died in hospital of a heart attack, just as he was chatting to an anaesthetist about his hip operation.

It underlined something Pell’s critics never understood about him.

To them, Pell was a schemer. A cold politician who rose to be the Vatican’s treasurer, third in line from the Pope, by putting his church above people.

And, they wickedly added near the end of his life, he was a paedophile.

Cardinal George Pell died in hospital of a heart attack.

For decades, the media pumped out this hatred of Australia’s most senior Catholic, a conservative who opposed their global warming religion.

Just last Friday, browsing in a second-hand bookshop I found a copy of The Prince, a purported portrait of Pell by one of his nastiest critics, former ABC presenter David Marr.

The publisher’s blurb sums up the ABC gospel on Pell that did so much to destroy his reputation. Marr’s book was “a portrait of hypocrisy and ambition” of “a cleric at ease with power”.

But the Pell I knew was a man of God, who couldn’t even in his last days shake his concern for my soul.

That real Pell is also there in his inspiring Prison Journal, written while in jail for 404 days for a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed.

The last paragraph says it all, with Pell, the son of a Ballarat publican, writing of the “man-God, whom I love and serve, whom I have followed for all my life”.

Oops. Sorry about all this God talk. It puts a lot of people off these days, and that was the problem with George Pell. No churchman here was firmer in defending his faith, and for that he was crucified.

Where did it all go so wrong? Many critics will point to May 1993, when Pell accompanied Australia’s worst paedophile priest, Father Gerald Ridsdale, to a court hearing.

The media went berserk. Myths grew that Pell defended Ridsdale in court and tried to hide his crimes (both false). Even Pell was badgered years later into admitting he’d made a “mistake”.

George Pell with Father Gerald Ridsdale outside court in 1993.

It was a mistake only because few people now understand Christianity. Pell was trying again to follow Christ, who preached to prostitutes, tax collectors and the despised, telling them even the worst sinner need only repent to be forgiven.

But who understands that message today, when the woke forgive no one? Look at the jeering on Twitter at Pell’s death – “rot in hell”, “mongrel”, and “need to know if George Pell felt any pain before he died like a cockroach”.

Pell, a Christian, would never have been so pitiless. This is the great moral chasm – Christians vs barbarians – into which he fell.

But you’ll want me to say something bad about Pell, even if just to show he wasn’t perfect and I haven’t guzzled the altar wine.

Well, Pell didn’t help himself by seeming aloof, cool and a little arrogant. I once castigated him for using the birth of the beloved daughter of a friend of mine to preach against the IVF techniques which conceived her. Pell sometimes lacked a sensitivity that could have spared him.

Yet what was done to him was more damning than anything he did.

For instance, Pell was accused by the witch-hunting Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse of helping the Bishop of Ballarat move Ridsdale from parish to parish, knowing he was raping boys.

The media pumped out hatred of Pell. Picture: Victor Sokolowicz

Pell denied it, and the commission had no evidence he was lying. In fact, it bizarrely claimed Pell was at a meeting of consulters where the bishop said Ridsdale was a paedophile, yet it accepted another consulter there didn’t know this until a decade later.

No, Pell had to be the fall guy for his guilty church, and Victoria’s police made sure of it.

Pell had long been hated by the Left, even since he became Archbishop of Melbourne and insisted priests and Catholic schools follow the church’s teachings and not their Left-wing own.

He also set up the first compensation scheme anywhere for victims of child-sex abuse, and put in reforms – almost entirely successful – to guard against paedophile priests, but that didn’t save him.

In 2015, Victoria Police advertised for complaints against Pell, asking “victims” to come forward. They then charged him with 26 complaints of child sex abuse against nine “victims”.

The charges were so far-fetched that all collapsed, but not before Pell spent more than a year in jail after being convicted of somehow raping two teenage boys at once in the open sacristy of his Cathedral, in the bustle just after Mass.

In fact, the evidence was clear: Pell was at the front of the Cathedral, talking to worshippers, at the only time the sacristy was free, and his accuser must have been outside, walking back with the choir. Neither the raped nor the alleged rapist could have been at the scene of the crime.

One of the two “victims” even told his parents there was no rape, and the High Court decided, seven judges to nil, Pell was innocent.

Pell always suspected senior Vatican clerics planted or supported these bizarre allegation to stop him investigating them for corruption. One of his enemies is now on trial.

Yet to this day, thousands of Australians still prefer this lie of Pell the paedophile, and the ABC has never apologised for pushing it. Like Nero, they’d rather crucify an innocent Christian than hear the truth.

In that respect, Pell follows the Christ he adored. Let Catholics remember him as a man, flawed but holy, martyred by pagans to pay for their sins.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: What my last phone call with George Pell revealed about him