Cardinal George Pell divided Australians. To his admirers, Tony Abbott among them, he was a much-wronged living saint. To his detractors he was practically the devil incarnate, a man whose inaction and dissimulation had allowed prolific sexual predators to flourish within the Australian Catholic Church. His evasions of responsibility meant that catharsis just could not be reached.
The dead cardinal should have been the quintessential Aussie success story: the country boy done good, a talented athlete who later proved himself a worthy scholar and leader of men. Yet Pell, whose childhood in Ballarat was no easy affair, never really left the footy field even when he went to play God’s greater game.
Such was his prowess that he was signed for Richmond in 1959. And he displayed the same talent for getting his way and heaving past opponents within the church, too. Superiors admired his “can-do” attitude. Those who resisted his ideas and his methods were often left in his wake.
But Pell was by no means a selfish player. He played for the team. He just defined victory differently from many of his teammates.
At heart the difference was this: for Pell the church was nothing if it was not a bastion of conservatism. Even in his final years, he was reiterating his combative philosophy: there was no benefit to seeking compromise with critics. His role — the leader’s role — was to give succour to the faithful, and to increase their number. To do that he needed to stand up for what the church believed in.
The problem was this alienated the many liberal Catholics for whom the core of Pell’s beliefs was not a point of consensus but anathema. He didn’t care. He had the courage of his convictions and he knew that God was on his side.
Pell’s steadfast and indefatigable faith are essential to understanding how he was able to endure the cruel and brutal miscarriage of justice which befell him in Victoria in his final years. To this outsider, a newcomer to Australia at the time of the trial, the charges against Pell always sounded implausible. Nevertheless, convicted Pell was — and many rejoiced.
It seemed as if Australians needed someone to be the focus of their anger at the church’s many failures over decades — and who else could that be but the cardinal who oversaw them? Senior churchmen such as he have always been vulnerable to false charges and rough justice but it was genuinely shocking and dispiriting to see injustice done to such a high-profile public figure in a place like Victoria. The High Court judgment upholding Pell’s appeal raised grave doubts about the efficacy, competence and impartiality of our criminal justice system.
But then there were the other victims of the child sexual abuse crisis: the victims of the priests Pell knew and had sometimes befriended. Gerald Ridsdale was one. Many in Australia felt Pell offered too much support to him for too long just to be trying to uphold the principle of innocence before proof of guilt.
And Pell lacked empathy for victims. Even in his prison journals, published in three volumes after his conviction was quashed, he sounded defiant. The crisis had not been his responsibility. Other institutions were just as culpable as the Catholic Church. The media was unduly hostile. The church’s enemies were poised to exploit any weakness.
Pell did acknowledge the tragic effects of abuse on victims but his overall tone neutralised the effect of those statements. The royal commission was scathing. Yet Pell, true to type, refused to accept its conclusions as definitive.
Pell’s supporters have continued to see him as he himself did — a martyr. They were oblivious to how distasteful this view looked to many non-Catholics for whom Australia’s most powerful Catholic was a man of great physical and intellectual stature who could have done things differently, but didn’t.
Was the dead cardinal “a martyr”? Was his conviction on child sexual abuse charges “a cruel and brutal miscarriage of justice”? Or did he deserve everything he got? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Where was the miscarriage of justice? A jury of 12 heard a witness and unanimously found him credible, despite the relentless efforts of the most formidable defence lawyers money could hire to interrogate him and undermine his credibility. A properly constituted court of appeal then found no error in law. It was only because of the wealth and connections of Pell’s backers that the case could reach the High Court – how many criminal offenders get that level of support? It remains highly unusual for the High Court to overturn such a conviction.
Meanwhile, the Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse had found that Pell had been looking the other way when it came to child sexual abuse, despite being surrounded by it at Ballarat, and found that Pell was not a credible witness. A fairly damning assessment, which was withheld from the jury and the public.
Pell was like some kind of ambitious and ruthless Renaissance prince of the church – a potentate. About as far from the humility and compassion of Christ as you can get.
Interesting that Brian Houston is on trial for looking the other way, but Pell seems to have eluded that charge, at least formally. The overwhelming evidence suggests he should have been charged with concealment of a crime as well.
I didn’t understand why that charge was not pursued.
It was an amazing decision by the High Court – overturning the conviction on “their” presumption that the jury might have been prejudice!
If this is law in Australia then why have juries?
Maybe it is time the the High Court itself was investigated!
Basically, the High Court has set a legal precedent for overturning any jury verdict based merely on the “feelings” of the judges. In essence, it has seriously lessened the integrity and authority of lower courts.
I have read both judgments from the Victorian Court of Appeal twice. The majority judgment insisted that Pell’s various alibis did not enable reasonable doubt, ones such as the belated discovery of an external procession, the fact that immediately after mass the sacristy would have been a beehive of activity, and Pell’s presence at the main door greeting parishioners after mass. There were a number of others. These judges failed to consider the cumulative affect of such alibis. Had they done so, these alibis clearly would have created a situation of reasonable doubt.
The dissenting 330 page dissenting judgment by Justice Weinberg effectively demolished the majority judgment. Moreover, I recall that Justice Weinberg was the only judge in the trio who had specialised in criminal law.
I recommend that interested people take the effort to read both judgments, and to make an informed assessment after so doing.
Ultimately, because the judges of the High Court concurred with Justice Weinberg, the oft stated argument that they had looked after their influential mate is bogus.
Sure, Pell had very deep flaws. However, even he (and Bruce Lehmann) deserve nothing less than a fair trial.
One day, even you or I may be praying for a fair trial, should we fall out of favour with the law.
As an ex Altar Boy, I am here to assure you that anyone who believes a Sacristy can be a hive of activity believes that pigs fly, that the earth is flat, and that Iraq had WMDs. None of the Wise men who have presented this as ‘evidence’ have addressed the crucial nail in the coffin of their twisted logic: the altar boys were caught by Pell DRINKING ALTAR WINE. Sure, a hive of activity, common practice for 13-year-old boys to get on the booze in the sacristy after Mass, hey, have one on me say the members of the hive of activity.
Exactly. I was an altar boy too for 6 years. I cannot remember the Sacristy being a hive of activity. It was more a place of solace for the priest and a place for him to organise the service. He wasn’t allowed to see anyone there that was not involved with the Mass and wouldn’t even see the lay readers, who were part of the service in delivering the Mass, there. Wasn’t there also a controversy about his robes and garments being impossible to remove in such a manner as to enable oral sex? This was the crucial piece of evidence. That sex of any kind would be too difficult due to the presence of the priest’s robes and outer garments. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.
I too was an alter boy in the 70s and I don’t recall anyone ever coming into the sacristy other than the priest, his acolytes and us alter boys.
“The High Court judgment upholding Pell’s appeal raised grave doubts about the efficacy, competence and impartiality of our criminal justice system”. See you’ve also placed this line in your op-Ed for Nine papers. Probably provides some comfort for Dutton’s Trumpist pronouncement on the matter but I don’t think the High Court was investigating the efficacy, competence and impartiality of our criminal justice system, it was investigating a particular case.
As to, “Senior churchmen such as he have always been vulnerable to false charges and rough justice”. The charges were not false, they were sufficient to go to trial but ended up not proven and the justice was not rough. If I am looking historically for sources of rough justice and false charges I suspect I”d find a disproportionate number coming from ‘senior churchmen”.
And you are very light (almost as light as Pell) on his complicity, enablement and covering up of child molestation across decades. And then his deciding that the protection of “mother church” was more important than what had happened, was happening, to the victims. One suspects a reactionary authoritarian like himself just thought they should toughen up?
Finally the author is described as “senior research fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University.” So many paradoxes and contradictions in nearly all of those terms. You can have religion or critical inquiry, you can’t have both. Likewise you can have Catholicism or a University, not both. I put ACU as roughly on a par with IPA, apologias and narrow interests in academic masquerade.
Very well said AP 7.
A perfect response to the total sophistry of Pattenden. Then again, Pattenden is one of the reasons Church numbers have sunk westwards: in other words, you can’t fool most of the people most of the time…Then again, did I just write that in view of the way the US has fooled the Western World that it stands for Freedom and Democracy?
If you were new to Australia at the time of the trial you would have missed the whole Royal Commission and his efforts to avoid giving evidence. The evidence was so dismissive of victims when given . “it was of no interest to me”He was found not be a credible witness and to have failed to act to prevent further abuse. This is enduring legacy of George Pell. You are trying to make Pell a victim here when he most certainly was not.
Someone in Miles’ position must know about the Royal Commission. And, if he does not, he has no place writing an article about Pell. Whether it’s deliberate or not, I do wonder whether some people are seeking to erase the Royal Commission from our history.
Pell may have given ‘succor to the faithful’ (please ignore any innuendoes), but he sure as hell did not increase their number. A man less likely to encourage the spread of the Catholic faith would be hard to find.
The Catholic church is one of the world’s biggest and wealthiest businesses and must be aware that there are no more continents to invade, and that the only increase in the numbers of their faithful is likely to be by natural processes, hence, perhaps, refusal to condone birth control. Being such a sprawling multi-national in urgent need of business acumen, a scheming bastard like Pell was just what they needed. And still do, presumably. Genuine saintliness and focus on pastoral care doesn’t get beyond middle management, and certainly not to the ‘paradise’ of the Vatican. A fish rots from the head.
I’ve never considered God’s reality as a serious proposition, but Pell’s death by fat embolism has me doubting my atheism. A sign???
I’m not so sure about a “miscarriage of justice.” As the previous article states, His entitlement to the presumption of innocence was thus restored, and remains in place following his death. It is a presumption, not a declaration.
Anyway, many cases are dismissed on appeal. That doesn’t mean there was a miscarriage of justice, necessarily.
More effusion from Cloud Cuckoo Land: then again, look at Miles’s CV. What should we expect?
Precisely. Pell’s conviction was quashed on a technicality. Two unanimous juries and 2 of 3 appeal judges saw through millions of dollars worth of shiny-pants lawyers’ gob spittle, the former without the benefit of knowing a Royal Commission had already found him to be an unreliable witness, i.e. on the question of child sexual predators, a liar. No amount of finely written opinion pieces and intellectual contortions will resurrect his reputation, nor convince many lapsed and practising Catholics of his essential decency, let alone that he was actually, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, warm, empathic and living out “Christian values”.
In contrast to his self-assessment and his supporters among the brain dead IPA-Murdoch glitterati, he was a disaster for the church. After Vatican II he made it his life’s mission to ensure congregations and communities would never share power in their church, and to entrench control in the hands of divinely chosen male clerics. He set out to maintain it as a medieval hierarchy riddled with pre-scientific and pre-Enlightenment thinking. My only regrets at his relatively youthful passing is that he will not have to watch as his extremist conservative project fails, and he will not have to endure the consequence of his ceaseless, science-ignorant activism against action to address anthropogenic global warming. In the latter pursuit he showed himself to be completely uninterested in the plight of humanity and particularly not the meek and destitute…