Modern, multicultural church Pell’s revenge
The death of Cardinal George Pell was always going to be a watershed moment for the Australian Catholic Church. Already, the Pell deniers are out there, trying to spin his legacy as the last will and testament of a particularly nasty disease.
This cardinal cancelling is a joint exercise between hostile secularists and bitter Catholics. Each cohort loathed Pell as a highly effective conservative warrior, and want to be sure both body and spirit have passed from this Earth.
On the secular side, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews was early to battle, denying Pell a state funeral no one wanted and no one had requested. It was a fitting tribute from someone who locked down his entire state for an overwhelming epidemic that never actually eventuated.
He was followed by the ABC, which strove to ignore Pell’s crushing unanimous vindication by the High Court in favour of safely post-mortem insinuations of personal and institutional child abuse. “Star reporter” Louise Milligan began personally trying Pell on charges she claimed could have been laid out of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse, but never were.
The progressive Catholic critique, as expressed by all-purpose clairvoyant Francis Sullivan, was even wider. On child abuse, it condemned Pell as at least responsible and recalcitrant in his various leadership roles. But it also attacked that leadership itself as brutal, repressive, out of date and possibly responsible for climate change
As a collective exercise in fantasy, it all rivalled the Y2K bug.
The common thread to all these attacks is clerical abuse of children. The central idea is to define the past of Pell and the future of Catholicism in Australia as irretrievably tainted by the facilitation of abuse. This will be a long and continuing campaign.
One unremarked irony of all this is that each of Pell’s critics have themselves assimilated the experience of survivors for their own purposes. For Premier Andrews, with his “see you, believe you” mantra, it is about political and media positioning.
For the ABC, it is part of the broadcaster’s perennial campaign against a “conservative” church. Milligan wants to secure her place as the Greta Thunberg of clerical abuse, and bolster her own outdated, sensationalist publications. For totems of the Catholic Left, like Sullivan, the game is to pin opponents as tolerators of child abuse.
Remarkably, it is always assumed that every victim wants to be represented by these overlords of victimisation. But many do not. They see their experiences as being appropriated. They do not want Andrews, Aunty, Milligan or Sullivan as their self-appointed loud hailers.
The greatest opportunity presented is for “liberal” Catholics. If traditional Pell-ite Catholicism is nothing more than a platform for clerical child abuse, their way to institutional and theological dominance of the antipodean church is open.
This potential boost to Catholic revisionism may be the most important outcome of Pell’s death. Successfully prosecuted, it would have the longest-term effects, and fits neatly into the battle for the soul of the Australian church.
Slightly bored non-Catholics will have been confused about the frenetic analysis of peri-mortem theological pieces either written or supposed to have been written by Pell. They will have picked up at least that the cardinal was opposed to something called “synodality”, which sounds like a sort of industrial glue.
In fact, synodality is the current fab craze in the Western church. Everybody wants to be synodal. The problem is, what can it be made to mean?
It is pure Pope Francis. The pontiff is overly inclined to come up with an interesting idea and see where it runs. What he probably meant was that each part of the church – bishops, priests and laity – should act in co-operation and without condescension. But in the Western world, synodality has been used as a licence to overthrow both established doctrine and structure.
Pell foresaw this and publicly combated the concept of synodality. In light of disruptive events in places such as Germany, even Francis may be having second thoughts. But it is the outcome of this struggle for dominance that will shape the immediate future of the church in Australia.
It very clearly is a struggle over power, rather than principle or structure. Quite simply, people such as Sullivan want leadership of the church transferred from the bishops to the laity.
But not just any laity. Power should go to a small woke lay elite, the same elite that already directs many operations of the Australian church through positions of power in Catholic health, social services and education. Some laity are more equal than others.
It is vital for these lay leaders to destroy the contrary legacy of Pell and people like him. This is why traditionalists are fixed with total responsibility for church child abuse. It explains why Pell himself is dismissed as authoritarian, elitist and exclusive. He is a cardinal from the past, whose prescription will poison the church.
It is all very self-serving, and balm to the egos of the new church. But is its prophecy of doom if Catholics follow the path of Pell correct? It seems highly unlikely. The leaders of this revolt of the elite are the religious equivalents of diehard hippies. Aged at least in their 60s, they hark back to a largely imaginary swinging church of Vatican II. Their every word exhales a sour, old breath of embittered defeat and rancorous resentment.
If this is the future, you would hate to see the past.
One of the most interesting things about the death of the cardinal was the identity of those interviewed in the media. Of course, the ABC went to reliable purveyors of doom, such as cemented critic of Catholics David Marr, or the sad, scarpered ex-priest, Paul Collins. But two things were noticeable when the “ordinary” laity were interviewed. First, they were overwhelmingly Pell-positive. Second, they did not have Irish names like Collins or Craven.
The immediate origins of these on-the-ground Catholics were The Philippines, Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East and Vietnam. They were determined and articulate. Most of all, they were young, hopeful and, in Catholic terms, orthodox.
This is Pell’s revenge. What he called the vibrant, brown-eyed church that will take over just as the tired, blue-eyed church is collapsing. These are the Catholics who take the sacraments, and who actually believe what the church teaches.
Demographics are always a strong bet. Simple numbers show that the upper middle-class Anglo-Celtic Catholics most comfortably disengaged from the church are increasingly irrelevant in the face of a new, confident and inconveniently multicultural church.
Time is not Pell’s enemy. It is his best friend.
Greg Craven is the former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.
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