Cardinal George Pell’s prison journal records 400 days of purgatory

Keeping a 300,000-word journal helped George Pell in prison, the Cardinal now planning for a quieter life in Sydney.

Cardinal George Pell on Monday.

George Pell intends calling Sydney home from now on.

When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, he will return to Rome to pack up his apartment, especially its thousands of books.

While as interested in church matters as ever, he does not envisage taking on any more major roles. He will be 79 in June. And after serving as Vatican treasurer, leading Australia’s largest two archdioceses, running a seminary and establishing several univer­sities, he is ready for a quieter life, “growing a few cabbages and roses’’. But not all the time.

If the cardinal’s prison journal becomes a bestseller, he can deem his investment in writing pads and pens over the past 13 months worthwhile. Like his prison watch, phone calls, stamps and shaving gear, stationery came out of his $140-a-month budget.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, Cardinal Pell relates how writing about his experiences — as well as about theology and many other topics — filled part of his day at the Melbourne Assessment Prison and at the Barwon jail, near Geelong.

He produced about 300,000 words in all. He also kept busy reading, including the 4000 letters he received, and praying, with a period for exercise every day.

The flow of letters he received, he wrote in one journal entry, “reminds me of the many loyal friends I have in Australia and in many other countries’’.

Cardinal George Pell's handwritten notes and volumes submitted to The Australian.

In one journal entry, Cardinal Pell writes of his happiness when his teacher from seminary days, John McCarthy, now 82, was ­allowed to celebrate mass for him in jail.

“Once again, as mass was beginning, I thought how terrible it would be to be prevented from celebrating or attending mass for nearly four years,’’ Cardinal Pell wrote.

“The ancient ritual, whose central elements go back to Our Lord Himself, is worth more than 1000 sermons.’’

In a more recent entry, writing about the COVID-19 pandemic, Cardinal Pell noted that in Victoria, the Premier had “finally closed the casino many days after he had closed the churches’’.

He also wrote that in Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had asked for 250,000 volunteers to help the elderly and already 500,000 people had come ­forward. The response was evidence of “social capital which might not be equalled in all or many Western countries’’.

Cardinal Pell found the prison officers “courteous and decent’’, but like all prisoners, he endured “petty humiliations’’, including handcuffs and strip searches.

A keen gardener, he briefly had a job tending the garden on the roof of the MAP “but I lost it in a demarcation dispute”.

More of Cardinal George Pell's handwritten notes and volumes submitted to The Australian.

In the interview, Cardinal Pell took aim at Victoria’s government, criticising its “guilt by accusation’’ approach to child sexual abuse.

Last week, the High Court found Cardinal Pell had been wrongfully imprisoned by Victoria for more than 400 days.

He had always protested innocence over claims he abused two choir boys after high mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral in December 1996.

In response to the High Court’s decision, Premier Daniel Andrews had a message for “every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse: I see you. I hear you. I believe you”.

Cardinal Pell said victims should be accepted as credible. “I believe them,’’ he said.

“But what has to be established is that they are victims. Guilt by accusation is a mark of an uncivilised society.’’

Was Mr Andrews’s Victoria becoming a less civilised society, then?

“People can draw their own conclusions,’’ Cardinal Pell replied.