George Pell case: new battle plan needed as due process kicks in

If George Pell once got to pick his fights — from the scandal of abortion to the sins of homosexuality — he has since learned to open new battles in response to those hostilities aimed at him. Pell may be an Oxford scholar, but he is also a student of Sun Tzu.

His response when Melbourne’s Herald Sun revealed the details of a police investigation early last year was a tone of outraged denial to the “baseless” allegations. Yet Pell’s office went further — Pell demanded an investigation into the leak of the police investigation.

He adopted a similar approach when a book was released last month. Pell’s office responded in the long-established tone — imperious, outraged and unambiguous. “Each and every allegation of abuse and cover-up against him is false,” it said. “The book is an exercise in character assassination.”

Pell would launch defamation action. First, he would await “the outcome of due process”.

Yesterday, after a protracted game of back-and-forth between police and the Office of Public Prosecutions, the police laid criminal charges. Due process is set to begin next week in the Melbourne Magistrates Court.

It’s another involuntary leap for a powerful figure whose clamp on his public agenda first loosened in 2002. At the time, when allegations of abuse against him were aired — and subsequently dismissed by a retired Supreme Court judge in a church-constituted inquiry — Pell spoke of being “exonerated”.

Pell has since appeared at a parliamentary inquiry and a royal commission, repeatedly and before an audience of abuse survivors who reflexively hissed, howled and heckled. He has always fronted these forums as a church leader. The questions and criticisms pertained to his responses to sexual abuse.

Yesterday’s developments are uncharted territory as the Cardinal now faces a criminal court, not a church inquiry. The allegations demand public scrutiny of Pell’s own history.

The Vatican’s Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, and a Companion of the Order of Australia, will be obliged to leave these and his other titles at the door, alongside the metal detectors, of the William Street complex.

Here, he will be George Pell, 76, of Rome, versus the crown. Armed with one of the best QCs in the country, he will engage in the biggest fight of his professional and private life.

He will defend claims against his personal conduct. Since day one, Pell captioned this imagery with “strenuously denied”.

In the 1990s Pell, as the then archbishop of Melbourne, had instituted his Melbourne Response, a capped compensation scheme for church abuse victims.

In 2002, he commanded the blind support of public figures from then prime minister John Howard down. Back then, Pell felt free to catalogue society’s sins, from same-sex unions to contraception, untethered to the pedophilia rot within his church. He said abortion was a “worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people”.

Attitudes have changed — Pell himself has admitted as much. Yesterday, public leaders mumbled pronouncements about presumptions of innocence and the course of justice. They played safe — Pell, after all, is the biggest Catholic figure in Australian life since Melbourne archbishop Daniel Mannix, whose statue stands outside St Patrick’s Cathedral.

Pell has been a moral talisman for conservative leaders and an emblem for a besieged church — as such, he has doubled as a
bull’s-eye. He was long detested by elements within the church, including his Melbourne archbishop predecessor Frank Little, who was labelled in death (by Pell, among others) as a protector of pedophile priests.

Pell’s career, at home at least, has been rocked by allegations of systemic church cover-ups.

His foundation story speaks of a pub upbringing and footballing prowess, and a cheery way with kids.

From Ballarat, this point of fact unpicks any easy telling of Pell’s life. Ballarat was the cesspit of priestly pedophilia. Pell lived for a time with Gerald Ridsdale, the former priest who exploited his trusted position to be one of the most shameless abusers of children in modern history.

Pell has always maintained that he did not know. What he did or did not know, and what he ought to have done, are the kind of provocative questions that offer Lindy Chamberlain-like barbecue appeal.

Under questioning, he has blamed errant individuals, such as Little and Ballarat bishop Ronald Mulkearns, for the perpetuation of pedophile scandals. Bad people, it was, not bad systems. Pell himself was guilty of nothing, he seemed to say, except perhaps vaulting ambition at the cost of hopeless incuriosity.

Until yesterday, Pell was ostensibly an observer and facilitator in the process of knowledge and reform. He framed his role as protector and saviour. “Cardinal Pell has always helped victims, listened to them and considered himself their ally,” his office said early last year. Pell had “led from the front to put an end to cover-ups, to protect vulnerable people and to try and bring justice to victims”.

Survivors of sex abuse have generally nominated Pell as an obstacle to progress. They have queried his priorities. In the court of public opinion, Chrissie Foster and husband Anthony, whose daughters were abused by the one priest, skewered him with their quiet dignity.

Other victims, especially from Ballarat, invariably pause on hearing Pell’s name, before scowling. Perhaps a single image is more damning than any tale — it shows Pell accompanying Ridsdale to court in 1993. He later called this decision a “mistake”.

Pell is clerical of tone. Survivors say he reduces lifelong emotional scars to legal abstractions, and oozes loftiness when they seek warmth. In Rome, when the royal commission roadshow came to him, complete with travelling survivors, a new word was coined — “apellogy”. Pell said yesterday that he wanted to clear his name as soon as possible.

Until due process is completed, he might fall back on the “Catholic convictions” he said sustained him during the “dark weeks” of abuse allegations in 2002. Or seek guidance in the forbidding stare of Mannix.