George Pell, truth and tradition on trial

The late Cardinal George Pell is farewelled at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney this week. Picture: Giovanni Portelli, The Catholic Weekly

George Pell was an old-style churchman with strong opinions. He and I had our differences. He was no admirer of contemporary Jesuits, and I am one. I got to know him best when I attended his trials on charges of child sexual abuse, which I had realised at once were preposterous. I grew to admire his good humour and humility in the face of what was nothing more than an appalling police sting operation protracted by grossly erroneous judicial reasoning by Victoria’s two most senior judges. His prison journals revealed a Christian able to find grace in the middle of adversity and injustice.

Even in death, George Pell has continued to excite interest and controversy. I was in Boston during the 2005 conclave. Many Americans asked me if Pell might be elected. My standard answer was, “The Church is not yet ready for an Australian pope.” Pell played a significant role in the 2005 and 2013 conclaves. Despite being over 80 and unable to vote, he hoped to have a decisive influence in determining the outcome of the next one. At lunch in Rome a few weeks ago, he assured me that the next conclave was not far off.

Knowing he was due for a hip replacement, he had told friends that he would not return to Australia for surgery (he died after a cardiac arrest following the operation). He didn’t want to risk being on the other side of the world post-op and pre-conclave. Pope Francis is still with us. It’s Pope Emeritus Benedict and Cardinal George Pell who are deceased.

In a posthumous article for The Spectator, Pell writes: “Diocesan bishops are the successors of the Apostles, the chief teacher in each diocese and the focus of local unity for their people and of universal unity around the Pope, the successor of Peter. Since the time of St Irenaeus of Lyon, the bishop is also the guarantor of continuing fidelity to Christ’s teaching, the apostolic tradition. They are governors and sometimes judges, as well as teachers and sacramental celebrants, and are not just wall flowers or rubber stamps.”

This observation about the role of bishops holds the key to his life and ministry. It explains his pugilistic approach, his focus on truth and tradition. He saw his role and solemn duty as a bishop to be an enforcer, especially against what he described as “the Protestant liberals in the Catholic Church”. He thought many Jesuits – me included – were among them. He was dismayed in later years to see a new spring in our step in response to the Francis papacy.

Pell chose to go it alone and, as ever, went to the top end of town and employed the best lawyers to assist.

George Pell was born in the provincial city of Ballarat, Victoria, on June 8, 1941. His father, also George, had been a publican and boxer, and was not religious; his mother, Margaret, was a Catholic of Irish extraction. George was an all-rounder, competent at sport and the academy. He excelled in the seminary and was sent to Rome, where he was ordained in St Peter’s Basilica in 1966. He was then sent to Campion Hall, Oxford, where his doctoral thesis was “The exercise of authority in early Christianity from about 170 to about 270” – the time of St Irenaeus of Lyon.

In the introduction he wrote: “As orthodox and heretical teachers began to develop a Christian theology during the second century, the teaching role of the clergy (bishops and presbyters) was brought under severe pressure. The bishops led the fight for orthodoxy, characterised their opponents as intellectuals, and channelled popular feeling for their position by appealing to the simple, traditional, oneness of faith against the speculations and extravagances of their opponents.”

He detailed, and did not lament, the waning influence of the laity by the third century: “The mass of the laity never dominated the life of the Church, but individual charismatics, be they teachers, prophets or confessors, played important parts at times.

“We have mentioned the eclipse of lay teachers.

“Similarly, the appeals of the confessors to reconcile the lapsed are brought under episcopal control. The rejection of prophecy, following on the Montanist crisis, closed another avenue of lay expression. That their influence diminished the further we move into the third century is shown in the part they played in the election of clerics, and in conciliar gatherings. They were still quasi-official witnesses, but their role came to be more and more dominated by the provincial bishops.”

He returned to Australia in 1971, confident that any bishop worth his salt would keep the laity in their place. Little did he know that his later career was to be plagued by the curse of child sexual abuse in the Church and by financial scandals in the Vatican – the sins not of laity, but of clergy. At a very early age, he became a diocesan consultor to the Bishop of Ballarat, Ronald Mulkearns. In 1985 he was appointed rector of the seminary in Melbourne, and in 1987 became an auxiliary bishop to the Archbishop of Melbourne, Sir Frank Little. Mulkearns and Little oversaw dioceses with a disproportionate number of child sex offenders in the ranks of clergy and teaching brothers; both were old-style bishops who kept the bad news to themselves.

When he became Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, Pell set up the “Melbourne Response”, an attempt to deal with a backlog of cases of child sexual abuse. The other dioceses in Australia were finalising details of their joint protocol “Towards Healing”.

Pell chose to go it alone and, as ever, went to the top end of town and employed the best lawyers to assist. His protocol was designed in co-operation with Victoria Police and the Victorian solicitor-general. Whatever defects in the protocol were to be found later, none had been declared by police or government at the time. Similar defects were later found in “Towards Healing”.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, established in 2012 and reporting five years later, had a strong focus on the Catholic Church. The chief commissioner, Justice Peter McClellan, and the assisting counsel had Pell in their sights. In their Ballarat case study, they said it was “inconceivable” that diocesan consultors, including Pell, did not know by July 1977 of the abuse committed by the paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale “given the usual practice and the general knowledge in the community”. But they went on to accept the evidence of two other consultors that they did not know about the abuse until many years later.

This shoddy and selective dealing with the evidence was repeated in the Melbourne case study, which looked at Pell’s treatment of an offending parish priest when he was auxiliary bishop; once again, the commission identified no evidence that Pell knew anything. Having received a detailed analysis of the royal commission’s findings from a panel of lawyers, Pope Francis allowed the publication of photos of a private audience at which he welcomed Pell back to Rome.

A Solemn Pontifical Mass for Pell at St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney. Picture: Giovanni Portelli, The Catholic Weekly

Enough has been written about the police sting and the miscarriage of justice Pell suffered when in 2017 he was charged with child sex offences alleged to have occurred in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, after an 11am Sunday Mass. The police had instituted a three-year “Operation Tethering” that they said “was set up to investigate possible unreported crimes committed by Cardinal George Pell”. It turned up nothing. The police did not even interview any altar servers, concelebrants or money collectors who would have been in the sacristy routinely immediately after the Sunday Mass. Not even the two state judges wanting to uphold the convictions could postulate a theory, let alone point to any evidence as to how Pell and two choristers could be alone in the sacristy immediately after Mass. According to his final account to the jury, the complainant would have reached the sacristy a couple of minutes after the altar servers arrived and some minutes before Pell could possibly have arrived. On April 7, 2020, in a unanimous judgment, Australia’s highest court, the High Court, with all seven judges sitting, unanimously upheld Pell’s appeal and quashed his convictions.

When we had lunch in Rome a month ago Pell was in good spirits, fearing nothing, and more than happy to give vent to his views, even to those like me who have a different appreciation of the attempts by Pope Francis to make the Church more synodal.

I left him knowing that we would always hold very different theological perspectives but in no doubt about Pell’s fearless, joyful proclamation of truth and tradition as he saw it.

We have all now been told that Pell was the author of the memo released last year under the pseudonym “Demos” and circulated to various cardinals, describing the present pontificate as “a disaster” and “a catastrophe”, and outlining the priorities for the next pope: “restore normality, restore doctrinal clarity in faith and morals, restore a proper respect for the law and ensure that the first criterion for the nomination of bishops is acceptance of the apostolic tradition”.

Shortly before he died Pell had apparently decided to allow The Spectator to publish the article that appeared under his own name this week in which he condemns the forthcoming synod on synodality as a “toxic nightmare”.

If a cardinal had published such excoriating views of the Pope and a pending synod process during the time of John Paul II or Benedict, Pell would have been the first to call for his dismissal from office and from all future curial activities.

But for Pell, anything goes in the defence of what he was convinced was truth and tradition. I recall Pell’s supporting Benedict’s dismissal of the very pastoral Australian bishop William Morris in 2011.

Pell gave this rationale: “The diocese was divided quite badly and the bishop hasn’t demonstrated that he’s a team player.”

By the time of his death, Pell was no longer a team player; he was taking a leading role in the faction opposed to the Pope’s reforms. Pell was doing all he could to uphold the role of bishop as he had enunciated it in his doctoral thesis 50 years ago. For Pell, unity with the pope was contingent on a shared understanding of truth and tradition.

Emboldened by the High Court’s vindication and by the exposure of the shortcomings and prejudices of the police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the two most senior judges in Victoria, Cardinal George Pell was determined to maintain the role of the bishops as defenders of unchanging church teaching and to quash the pretensions of the synodal process.

He never shrank from a fight. He thrived on conflict and it cost him dearly.

Frank Brennan is a Jesuit priest, Rector of Newman College at the University of Melbourne, and an adjunct professor at the Thomas More Law School at the Australian Catholic University. He attended the Pell trials and appeals at the request of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.