A call to cardinal virtues

CHRISTIANITY remains a force in Australian public life, says George Pell.

Cardinal George Pell

ON paper at least, Cardinal George Pell has failed to halt the advance of paganism since the latter day prophets of Baal now hold the balance of power in Canberra.

Pell marked his reception as Sydney's eighth Catholic archbishop in 2001 with a call to arms against the aggressive forces of secularism, cautioning that the rise of the Baal worshippers at the time of Elijah, in the 9th century BC, nearly overwhelmed monotheistic Judaism.

He called on Christians, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs to defend monotheism, to keep the spiritual waters flowing strong and deep, "so it would not be lost in billabongs -- closed backwaters without escape, where the water can only eddy in circles, as it evaporates or seeps into the sand".

Today, Pell's campaign to prevent catastrophic spiritual climate change has a more focused target: the Greens, whom he accuses of leading the charge to banish religion from the public square.

In May 2001, Bob Brown was the only Greens voice in the Senate, but in 2010 they won 13 per cent of the popular vote to take the balance of power in both chambers, with a voice that is even louder than their numbers would warrant.

"They've thrived so far because they've escaped the sort of scrutiny that's regularly put on the Catholic Church," Pell tells The Weekend Australian.

"Bob Brown is a very effective communicator. He's very good at getting across the presentable face of the Greens. They're well organised, intelligent, they believe in their cause, and they're exercising their democratic rights. I wish some others would be as energetic in putting forward their views as they have been.

"They're quite explicit about their opposition to Christianity, and some of these elements are, even in a muted way, in our two big parties."

Pell will not allow that the church's public voice is weaker, or that Christianity has lost cultural ground. He says New Zealand visitors often comment on the visibility of the Christian churches, and the Catholic Church in particular, in public life.

The church is embedded in public life here even more strongly than in Britain, he says, but the values of what is sometimes rudely called the chattering class are quite different from those of the general public.

"Say the Greens have got 10 per cent, and there might be another 5 per cent who think more or less like them, then 85 per cent are not swimming in that current," Pell says, citing the work of sociologist Hans Mol.

"The percentage would be reversed among the opinion makers, where 85 per cent of them might be heading in the wrong direction and 15 per cent of them have a steadier view."

The intelligentsia might face a rude shock if a change to the Marriage Act was put to a referendum, he agrees. "Same-sex marriage is not going to revive the Labor fortunes in Queensland or in the western suburbs of Sydney."

At almost 71, the cardinal offers no indication he is ready to retire from controversy; quite the reverse. On Monday night he will be debating Richard Dawkins, the spokesman for militant atheism, on ABC's Q&A.

"Australian common sense is still deeply imbued with many Christian notions. The notion of a fair go, I think, is impossible to understand without Christianity," he says. "If you go back to the ancient Greeks, Aristotle and Plato didn't give human rights to slaves or to foreigners.

"They instinctively, primarily limited their first loyalty not to everybody -- that is a Christian notion -- but to their own people or tribe."

We discuss the posthumous revival of B.A. Santamaria in political debate, where his name is used by the Left against Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in much the same way the Right likes to throw around the name of Karl Marx. Pell agrees there is limited understanding of what the National Civic Council leader stood for.

"His greatest achievement was when he answered the call from (opposition leader Herbert "Doc") Evatt to remove the communist leadership from the trade unions. The Catholic Church was the only significant organisation with a working-class base that could inspire people sufficiently to get out and be active in the unions.

"We smile indulgently now because the communist menace has passed. But immediately after the war, union after union after union was dominated by communist leadership.

"It's a further question as to whether they overreached themselves and became ambitious for other things. We all know the sad history of the Split."

Pell says Santamaria's legacy within the Catholic Church in Australia was to lay foundations for renewal at a time when Catholicism was torn between a loose embrace of modernity or the reaffirmation of traditional values. "There was a very real chance that we were going to follow the path of the Catholic Church in Holland, for example, where there was a catastrophic collapse because they followed not just liberal but radical left-of-centre church policies.

"He provided the ideas and especially the ammunition to good people who felt something was wrong, to support especially what John Paul II was doing."

On economic policy however, Pell finds a more ambiguous legacy: "He was never a free marketeer. He would be to the left of both the major political parties on economic policy.

"He would be more sympathetic, say, to preserving our rural base. And the way that has been destroyed and disappeared, that's a big issue. I think no major country in the world has let family farms disappear as rapidly and quickly as we have here in Australia. And I'm not sure that it's a particularly good thing."

Would Santamaria have changed his economic views if he were alive today? "No, I think he would be gloating because there has never been, since the 1930s a collapse like there was in 2008, the great financial crisis."

And while Pell personally has moved on to embrace the free market, he agrees with Santamaria's economic outlook on one respect. "I believe deeply he was right about the dangers of excessive debt. And that story's not over yet. The US has trillions and trillions of dollars worth of debt. I don't know how they're going to deal with that."