Cardinal George Pell was ‘full of beans’ in his last days
Close confidantes who had been in contact with George Pell in recent days say the Australian prelate had regained his fire and energy after elbowing his way back into the Vatican factional system.
George Pell died happy, having conquered legal and prison misery, elbowing his way back into the Vatican factional system.
“He was full of beans,” a close friend said after speaking to Cardinal Pell in recent days.
Another senior Catholic who broke bread with Cardinal Pell in Rome before Christmas said the fire and energy had well and truly returned, with no signs of his twin heart conditions holding him back.
Australian-based Stephen Elder, arguably the most significant leader in state-based Catholic education of his generation, had known Cardinal Pell since the 1970s and was also in contact while the cardinal was overseas.
He laments that Cardinal Pell passed without many in the community understanding him. “Given the High Court decision, it is fair to say that the cardinal was treated unfairly through the judicial process,’’ Mr Elder said.
“I knew the cardinal for 50 years and I found him to be very principled. He was a man whose public persona never matched the private individual. He had a great sense of humour.”
That humour, informed by a bright, dancing mind and bolstered by a frenetic work ethic and Oxford education, rarely made its way into public life but was well known to his inner sanctum.
Prime Ministers, popes, sick children. Staff, friends. Those who believed in Cardinal Pell were rewarded with loyalty. Late night phone calls, prayers for the sick and dying. Quiet, deliberative counsel.
The complainant who gave the evidence that led to Pell’s convictions did not speak publicly on Wednesday. Viv Waller, the lawyer who represented the choir boy in the sex abuse allegations that led to Cardinal Pell being jailed for more than 400 days, said that his Melbourne Response scheme to deal with victims of Catholic abuse and the invoking of the so-called Ellis defence had stained the cardinal’s legacy. “He always elected to take the path that was mean-spirited and penny-pinching,” she said.
Chris Goddard, a global expert on sex abuse, said he would not speak ill of the dead: “But he was a man who did some hard yards silencing victims.”
For his supporters, the many controversies and scandals surrounding the cardinal personify the decay of public debate in Australia. The haters hated with vicious determination and the lovers loved with blindness.
From the moment Cardinal Pell, who died on Wednesday aged 81, was charged with multiple cases of alleged child abuse in 2017, there was a sense of shock, disbelief and disgust. The initial allegations, most of which did not proceed, ranged from water-based activity in a pool and lake to claims of wrongdoing in a Ballarat cinema and St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne.
Cardinal Pell was ultimately charged — and convicted — with abusing two choirboys in the cathedral in late 1996 and early 1997.
Those familiar with the machinations of mass in the cathedral and the opportunity for offending in such a short time frame were aghast. How could Cardinal Pell have, in five or six minutes, had the opportunity to offend in the sacristy when the realities of solemn mass defied the logic of offending having occurred?
Having read the trial transcripts, Jesuit lawyer Frank Brennan, who did not speak on the legal matters on Wednesday, became deeply concerned that Witness J had changed his story multiple times. According to Cardinal Pell it was 24 times. “That’s what convinced me it was a sting operation by the police,’ Father Brennan said, according to a report published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne.
The defence was highly critical of aspects of Witness J’s evidence but informed, detached sources familiar with the proceedings, described the complaint’s demeanour in the court as compelling.
Despite all the doubt about the plausibility of Cardinal Pell being able to offend, the charges stuck until the High Court intervened. Although the dissenting judge in the Victorian Court of Appeal, criminal expert Mark Weinberg, rang very loud bells.
The High Court found, just as coronavirus was breaking across the world, for Cardinal Pell. It decided unanimously that the jury, acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a doubt about his guilt and ordered that the convictions be quashed. Thus ended the trial of the century and Cardinal Pell was whisked away, after an overnight stay with the Carmelites, to Sydney for the resumption of his tumultuous life.
For all Cardinal Pell’s strengths, his capacity for spectacular misjudgements was legendary.
None greater than his decision to attend court to support perhaps the church’s worst pedophile, former priest Gerald Ridsdale, in the early 1990s. This act of strategic foolishness came to define him in the eyes of sex abuse victims.
Ridsdale, who was well known to Cardinal Pell, is rotting in jail with potentially hundreds of victims across mainly western Victoria. In 2020, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse said that Cardinal Pell was told in 1982 that Ridsdale was being moved between parishes because he was an abuser. It also said Pell was conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy as early as 1973 and failed to act on complaints about priests.
It rejected Cardinal Pell’s evidence that he was lied to by church officials about Ridsdale and disgraced Melbourne parish priest Peter Searson.
Cardinal Pell is known to have been furious about the commission findings but was counselled to move on and live his life after being freed from jail.
After he was released, Pell told Sky’s Andrew Bolt that he was a victim of culture wars.
“The culture wars are real. There is a systematic attempt to remove the Judaeo-Christian legal foundations, marriage, life, gender, sex,” he said. “There is less rational discussion and more playing the man.”
Many in the church believe that Cardinal Pell was right.
The Catholic Church has never in modern times been under more pressure from a changing society but also a religion that has been relentlessly kicking own goals.
The church’s record on child sex abuse is self-evidently reprehensible. Still, the role of police in Cardinal Pell’s prosecutions remains under a cloud.
The royal commission which preceded the charges was triggered at least in part on incomplete Victoria Police attempts to collate the number of suicides linked with child sex abuse and the church in the Ballarat area. One of the civilian leaders of the anti-church push in Ballarat emerged as a former offender himself, even if the circumstances were complex and tragic in their own way. Everywhere you look, there are contradictions and conspiracies.
Anthony Albanese and former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott spoke in support of Cardinal Pell on Wednesday although the latter two with more enthusiasm.
It took federal Liberal leader Peter Dutton to reopen the debate about the state of Victoria’s legal system that enabled Pell to be jailed. “On his passing, the fact he spent a year in prison for a conviction that the High Court of Australia unanimously quashed should provide some cause for reflection for the Victorian Labor government and its institutions that led this modern-day political persecution,” he said. “Pell never lost faith in his god, his country, and in justice – despite the tests and trials he endured in life.”
Nearly three years after Cardinal Pell’s release from prison, calls for a royal commission or other formal inquiry into how the charges were ever laid have been ignored by the Labor government in Victoria. His death means an inquiry is even less likely.
