Note: this article mentions child sexual abuse.
Cardinal George Pell, deceased, once told a World Youth Day audience that “abortion is a worse moral scandal than priests abusing young people”. He was responding to a question; it is so often in the unscripted remark that we glimpse a person’s central truth.
Since Pell can no longer be defamed, the rush to define him is on. I don’t subscribe to the policy of not speaking ill of the dead, but we should still stick to the facts. On those, there are enough to pass judgment on what Pell was, and what he was not.
Pell was charged with multiple child sexual offences and convicted. He was acquitted by the High Court on appeal. His entitlement to the presumption of innocence was thus restored, and remains in place following his death. It is a presumption, not a declaration — an important distinction — but the law and our social contract dictate that the question is left where it landed: not guilty. It is better that we respect that.
We need not respect Pell, however. The public record of his actions and inactions as a senior cleric of the Catholic Church in Australia speaks loudly, channelling the unheard cries of the church’s child victims.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse made numerous factual findings regarding Pell’s knowledge of serial child sexual abuse by other priests and what he did about it. It found that, by 1973, Pell — then a priest in Ballarat and sharing a house with the notorious predator Gerald Ridsdale — “was not only conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy but had also considered measures of avoiding situations which might provoke gossip about it”.
Ridsdale was constantly moved from one parish to the next, as his flagrant predation would trigger outcry. It was standard practice by the church, certainly in the 1970s, to deal with its paedophile priests in this way. The commission found that by 1977 Pell knew what Ridsdale had been doing.
In 1982, Ridsdale was still operating and still being protected. Pell claimed that, in a meeting of senior clergy regarding Ridsdale’s removal from Mortlake parish, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns lied to him about the reason. The commission didn’t believe that, concluding that Pell was aware of the truth.
Peter Searson was another notorious priestly predator, known to Pell in the 1980s. The commission found that Pell should have advised church authorities to remove Searson but did not do so.
In 1974, the commission found, Pell was approached by a victim of another paedophile, Christian Brother Edward Dowlan. Pell’s response was to say “Don’t be ridiculous” and walk away. Pell conceded that he took no action.
In 1993, Ridsdale was finally charged with child sex offences (he was ultimately convicted of crimes against 65 children). At his first court appearance, he was accompanied by Pell as a supporter. Pell later said this was a mistake, but he had gone along to help Ridsdale secure a lesser punishment.
In 1996, Pell became archbishop of Melbourne. By then, claims by victims were beginning to pour into the church, and Pell instituted the “Melbourne Response” to investigate allegations of sexual abuse within the archdiocese. It was designed primarily to limit the church’s financial exposure (the cap was $50,000 for each claimant) and silence victims. It largely succeeded in these aims.
In 2001, Pell moved to the Sydney Catholic archdiocese, where the church spent more than $1 million defending an abuse claim by John Ellis. The commission found that the primary motivation was to discourage other claimants. Pell championed the so-called “Ellis defence”, a legal technicality that rendered the church institution immune from the consequences of the abuses perpetrated by its priests (essentially on the basis that the church didn’t exist as a responsible legal entity).
As for what Pell himself thought, he spent a lot of time in various witness boxes and press conferences and wasn’t shy about defending his actions.
Chrissie and Anthony Foster were the parents of two girls raped by Father Kevin O’Donnell. By his own admission, when the Fosters approached him, he offered them a small payment and warned them that if they sued the church it would “strenuously” defend the claim. While denying that this was intended to menace them, Pell explained that “we did not encourage people across the board to seek compensation through the courts”.
Giving evidence to the commission in 2014, Pell argued that the church’s responsibility for child sexual abuse by its priests was no greater than that of a “trucking company” whose driver had raped a hitchhiker.
During the commission hearings, Pell was asked whether he knew, at one point in the 1970s, that Ridsdale’s offending was common knowledge. Pell replied: “I don’t know whether it was common knowledge or whether it wasn’t. It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me.”
The objective truth about Pell is in his own words. He rose to the second-highest rank in the Catholic Church, during a period when child sexual abuse by priests was rampant and endemic, as it had no doubt always been, but now it was beginning to be exposed. He knew about it, was close to several of the worst serial perpetrators, was directly involved in the decisions to move them around rather than address (or report) their crimes, then personally crafted and managed the church’s institutional response to victims. He was, for decades, at the epicentre of the problem.
Pell knew, but he didn’t consider it at any stage to be a high priority. Morally or legally, child sexual abuse was never the most important issue on his ecclesiastical plate.
The conclusion is inevitable: Pell didn’t particularly care. He never saw the children who had been abused by priests, many of whom killed themselves, all of whose lives were destroyed, as his problem, except to the extent that they presented a financial and reputational risk to the church he obviously loved.
Consequently, Pell always followed his first instinct: protecting the rapists rather than the raped. Suffer the little children to come unto me.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency, call 000.
How does George Pell deserve to be remembered? Let us know your thoughts 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.
Correction: This article previously referred to Edward Dowlan as a “Catholic priest”, which was incorrect. Dowlan was a Christian Brother.
And a shout out to Chrissie Foster, a person of enormous courage and perseverance. I am not a Catholic nor a church attender though I have some good friends who are both. My thoughts are with Chrissie and her family, and all the others like them, in these difficult times which force them to recall episodes of appalling abuse.
Which sort of brings all the teachings of religion and Christianity into question.
The current determination by some to influence daily lives and women’s rights based on the same teachings is nothing short of hypocrisy.
Yes, the facts speak for themselves very clearly.
If Pell’s church is right about souls and the existence of Hell, then Pell’s soul should be heading for a nasty surprise.
Unfortunately the church is not right, and Pell’s soul will accompany his body into the dirt just like everybody else’s.
At least he suffered a bit for his cruelty while still alive, the many victims can take some comfort from that.
As for his earthly remains, no tax[payer dollars to be spent Under any circumstances. Let the Vatican burn them over there and send the ashes back in a jiffy bag to save the church some money.
Unfortunately, Dante’s Inferno shows as little interest as Pell himself in child abuse. But we can pin our hopes on Luke 17:2: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”
“and he cast into the sea”
Sea ? Hmmm. Think I’d prefer a sewerage pond.
So would Pell – he’s into the cannibalism & blood drinking of the Eucharist so coprophage is no biggie.
The Shovel reports that Pell was surprised not to have been met by St Peter and wasn’t quite expecting his new digs to be what they are.
https://www.theshovel.com.au/2023/01/11/george-pell-surprised-to-discover-heaven-so-damn-hot/
If he has been dumb enough to believe dogma, it will not be a surprise.
It seems incongruous to me that the church claims that priests are not employees and it therefore is not responsible for their actions, but there was government money available through Jobkeeper priests did become employees.
Very good point, and on what basis do they have charitable status if they don’t exist? How does the Catholic Education system receive taxpayer funding if they don’t exist?
You are confusing different things. The Ellis defence is very specific. It says priests are not employees of the church, and the church is ‘unincorporated’. Although that is often presented as saying the church does not exist, it is more accurate to say it is not a legal person. Go back far enough in history and only actual living people were persons according to law, and only they were subject to laws. Then the law began to recognise a ‘body corporate’ as another sort of legal person, subject to law like a natural person and able to hold property, enter contracts and so on. But of course this applies only to bodies that are by law ‘incorporated’, not to just any organisation, formal or informal. Unincorporated bodies still exist as they always have and always will, but they have little or no legal responsibility.
The diabolical cleverness of the Ellis defence is the way the Church managed to keep the various legal privileges it wants and needs, such as being able to hold on to its property and to run all sorts of trusts, charities and other bodies which may well be incorporated and might be employers (even though the church itself is not and doesn’t), while at the same time it dodged being accountable for the bad actions of any priests. The result makes each priest solely responsible for his bad actions, it is nothing to do with the church; no matter how much the church may enable, facilitate and defend such priests. Power without responsibility!
Thank you for your explanation, this was a clever defence and permitted by enablers via legislation.
What baffles me is all this pre-deluvian mumbo jumbo still holds sway, not only on 21st-century citizens who call themselves Catholics but in courts of law. Isn’t this just a hint that our so-called civilization has wandered up a creek associated with a word that begins with s and ends with the letter t.
Yes than you for the explanation. I would like to explore this notion as to what constitutes an “employee” and what constitutes an organisation as “unincorporated”. What does the latter even mean? How is it possible that priests are not employees when they are paid an allowance if not a wage from the Church, any Church, any denomination, and receive a benefit in the form of housing, like a Presbytery, Rectory or Manse?
The law is an ass? It is wrong and it is therefore a protection racket. I mean, they even made strikes illegal in this country during the 80s and 90s and the notion of precedent was not valid as strikes were declared illegal because they interfered with the running of a business and were an interference to property rights of the employer. This is why the Hawke/Keating Government had to legislate their validity and confine their undertaking. This more than anything strangled the unions. All of a sudden, the employer had rights over and above those of the workers whose labour they were exploiting. I remember the senior company managers at Boral Bathurst interviewing us in our proposed strike action telling us individually that strikes were in fact illegal, like the one we were planning to undertake in 1991, even though Courts and tribunals gave permission for them to happen and were hearing disputes and arbitrating and ruling on them. So, for those who are not in the know, it is possible for a court to interpret that priests are not employees. What?! Does the court think the gardener raped and abused children that came under the care of the Church? Was it the cleaner? The repair man? No. It was usually the priest who, in the education sphere, was also the teacher. Preacher and teacher. Yet the priest is not an employee. Go figure?! And unincorporated? What is that as opposed to incorporated? Hard to imagine that a court would come to these conclusions. There must be more to it. And there is. The Church is powerful and wealthy and therefore carries weight and influence and those privileged interests feel it needs protecting from the wrong that it does as its assets and wealth are considerable. Do religious bodies even pay taxes? Places of worship?
The latter is really not that difficult. Any time more than one person – a natural person, an actual human being – gets together with one or more other natural persons for any purpose, they are to some extent an organisation or a team or an association or something of that nature. Let’s say some guys get together to play a team sport against some others next Saturday. That’s an organisation or association of a sort. But that does not mean their organisation can be sued, that it can open a bank account, it can buy a house or it can take on employees. For those sort of things it has to be recognised by law as a person, and since it is not a natural person the organisation has to be recognised as an some sort of incorporated entity. Only then does it exist as a person in law.
The existence of corporations of various sorts again goes back in common law to medieval times. Guilds, merchant corporations, limited liability companies and so on all have a very long history.
Simply receiving some item of value, whether in cash or in kind, does not make somebody an employee. There are any number of such transfers of value that are not payment of wages or anything like. The basis of employment is that the employee has a contract of employment with the employer. As it is a contract it must be between legal persons, other natural persons or bodies corporate. Contracts of employment are derived from the laws concerning contracts of service, which in turn go back to the medieval laws concerning serfdom. All that stuff about being ‘free men’ that turns up in those nostalgic films and books about the olden days, centuries ago? That idea of freedom is very much about not being in service and not being a serf. Once you are employed you are not free. BTW it is important to note that a contractor providing services to a client is legally very different to being employed and always has been.
Priests are not employees because (a) they do not have contracts of employment; and (b) if they did have such a contract it must be with somebody else and not the Church directly because it is legally impossible for the church to be an employer.
Of course they do not. Even worse, they are exempted from filing returns with the tax office, so there is no way to quantify the cost of the concessions they are given. (The churches are always horrified by any suggestion they should reveal this informatoin, you may guess why.)
This is if anything even worse that the rest already discussed here. It would take a book to give a full account of how this scandalous situation has come about and the ways the churches have crushed all attempts at reform. There have been some attempts to challenge it through the constitutional provision against establishing religion but the High Court has refused to have a bar of it and has always ruled exactly as the churches would wish. Politicians who have tried to make even the most mild reform have been brutally put down by the churches mobilising all their influence. Mostly the exemption of churches from taxation exploits the definition of charitable work which explicitly includes, inter alia, promoting religion. Infallible really; only the sorts of churches that do not promote religion (which is clearly interpreted in a very generous way) need worry.
YES but this is all trickery and mumbo jumbo designed to distance the Church as far as possible from its responsibilities. I can tell you that if a person receives a gift from an employer and priests do receive wages BTW, then they cannot and should not be considered as anything else other than an employee. Even a contractor is subject to the rules and whims of the employer if they are working on that person’s or organisation’s property. See if they have an accident and sue the defendant?! You are correct in the limited legal definition of what you are saying but they are fundamentally incorrect and misapplied and false. Anyone who receives any benefit from an employer is an employee regardless of their employment relationship. That is true for anyone. People are deported if they say they are coming to paint their friend’s house and they are not on a work visa or are on a visa which prohibits work entirely. This is not because the authorities think it is repugnant that someone is working for nothing. It is because, firstly and obviously, some visas prohibit work but more so, it is because that “free” labour is being denied to an Australian citizen or a resident Australian person with work visa rights.
It all gets down to ideology and interpretation and power. The convoluted legal language you use is testimony to the abuse of law and language as much as power. Truth and legal correctness do not preclude nonsense.
You are confusing many different things. There’s no point blaming that on ‘convoluted’ legal language. The irony is that legal language is some of the clearest language available, the aim always is to be as clear and unambiguous as possible. It often fails, but that is more a reflection on the difficulty and confusion inherent in the matters being legislated, although it can also arise from rushing the job. For example the monstrous complexity of tax codes does not arise from their language, it is because the tax system has been made monstrously complicated.
If you have the skill to rewrite laws to produce the same result as they give now, but with greater clarity and less ‘convolution’, you should immediately apply for work as a legal draughter. You should be able to pretty much demand any salary you want, and earn the gratitude not only of the legal profession but the whole nation.
Your insistence that simply handing something of value to somebody makes them an employee shows your refusal to grasp the point. On this you seem to be as impervious to facts as any of the sovereign citizens. Receiving a present or gift does not make you an employee. Making a regular donation to a charity does not make the charity your employee. Handing your neighbour a slab of beer in gratitude for keeping an eye on your place while you take a holiday does not make your neighbour your employee. Volunteering to help disabled people does not make you their employee. None of the things you cite as evidence of an employment are sufficient proof of any such thing and none of them create, of themselves, a contract of employment.
“The irony is that legal language is some of the clearest language available, the aim always is to be as clear and unambiguous as possible”.
Hi. Look at the risk of sounding disrespectful this is just not true. legal language is intended to be ambiguous as is the legislation upon which non-tort law is framed. This is the purpose of legal language and legislation. For the purposes of flexibility. To allow basically “things to get done”. And common law, upon which our society and legal system is built upon, is a system which allows such ambiguity to be tested. Our legal language encourages the growth of court cases and discourages the rights of victims of the sort of abuse that so-called “clever’ lawyers use when Judges rule that the Church is an unincorporated body and priests are not employees. Like hell!! It is plain jurisprudence bias in favour of a fascist institution and an institution that many joined because they knew such an institution would provide cover for them to engage in such abuse and not face the full consequence of the law which others elsewhere do face. Even Brittany Higgins will get some money out of this.
If legislation is required to be flexible, then it has to worded to allow that flexibility; hence for example legislation that requires ‘reasonable’ actions, whatever that means. It is still “as clear as possible”.
Your ranting about the finding that priests are not employees is pointless and silly. It was an inevitable legal finding on the legal question once it was accepted there was no employment contract. The outrageous bit was accepting that therefore the church had no responsibility for any wrong done by any priest; that priests in effect act independently of the church. That was quite something.
And please stop tossing in words like fascist, it adds absolutely nothing, just devalues yet another word or term to the equivalent of either ‘bad’ or ‘good’ with no further significance. No wonder you moan about legal language. Your use of words is cavalier to the point where almost all meaning drains away.
“‘reasonable’ actions, whatever that means.”
Hi again buddy. In legal terms, reasonable was a term used in our outrageous common law system where in 1905, a Judge and administrators thought that a Clapham bus full of people thought that something was true and unable to be logically disproved then it was reasonable. Beyond doubt. In Australia that was changed to a Bondi tram full of travellers in 1936 I think. This sort of thing boggles the mind. Particularly over complex legal cases. That a bus full of pillocks, if they all thought the same thing, then it must be true. Reasonable meaning what any ordinary thinking person would believe to be true. Too much faith in my fellow man I think but there you go.
Again flexibility of legislation and legal meanings are so large that you can drive a proverbial Double-B truck through them. And lawyers do. I do not have faith in the legal system like you do. Not at all. U can say I am ranting. You can say what you damn well like but that doesn’t make me wrong.
So much rests on precedent and judges’ interpretation but no thought is given to context, comparison much less justice for victims or even due process.
I work for a large government department and I do not trust it at all. I’m glad you do but you don’t see the nepotism that goes on there, the trying your luck, the abuse and carelessness regarding OH&S issues, the issuing me to go out and process freight crew on an airport tarmac without high viz vests or a hard hat, walking underneath aircraft with all sorts of compartments and bulkheads, walking up slippery steel stairs, with only face masks and gloves for protection to determine if the crew have their correct paperwork – manifests, COVID tests, crew declarations – because senior officers believe that guys at my level can sort some mess out and get the job done. Too many people and too many businesses and too many government departments fly by the seat of their pants. And now we see it is the same in law. Hard to fathom. Finest minds and all that at the same essential level as lower to middle level clerical work and manual work. Saying something is black when it is white. Saying priests are not employees when people are deported for being employees under similar circumstances. Of course priests are employees. The absence of a workplace contract is a get out clause for the Church and maybe for the priest too. They receive a salary. They do. They receive housing. They go on leave. They do. They tell me about it in their sermons or their Mass when I used to attend. They are supplied with cleaning and even staff. They are answerable to a board or a higher office like the Catholic Education Office or the Anglican Synod. it is that judges and lawyers and legislators have not been able to summon the courage to interpret the law and the circumstances correctly because they are afraid of religious outrage and repercussions.
“Let’s say some guys get together to play a team sport against some others next Saturday. That’s an organisation or association of a sort. But that does not mean their organisation can be sued,…”
Wanna bet?!Of course they can be sued and they have been. Just because they are incorporated or unincorporated, they still are not exempt from the laws and rights which apply to everyone else. If one of the participants breaks a finger attempting to make a tackle, if a spectator is hurt when someone with the power and skills and ferocity of a Trevor Allan tackles a player into the sideboard and puts the player in traction for 6 months and takes out a spectator or 2, see what happens to this group of guys when they say to the Judge that they are an unincorporated body and can’t be sued. Of course they may not be able to do some of the other things you mention. This is why they don’t play cricket much at Richmond Oval any more. Because it clashes with the Saturday Markets that used to go all day there and the fear was that no matter how many times players yelled out 6 every time a batsman made a pull shot over mid-wicket from a rank long hop, there existed the possibility that a market buyer citizen would not cover their noggins and be KOed with all the medical and civil liabilities that would ensue. It was good enough for the HDCA to schedule matches elsewhere more often to avoid market days but the Church can use the same circumstances essentially and do what they damn well like, abuse and rape children, and cry to the Judge that because they are unincorporated and their priests and teachers are not employees, then please, Judge, don’t sell my cathedral to pay compensation for undeserving loser victims who are really society’s problems anyway. Don’t sell my school grounds worth multiple millions to pay these undeserving sons of single or dead head parents.
This judiciary is undeserving, the law is an ass and any attempt to indicate otherwise is providing cover for abuse perpetrators.
You may be correct from a very limited technical point of view but it doesn’t capture the whole picture which is that the Judiciary will always protect another repressive civil apparatus and privileged wealthy institution. And they will misuse legal language to do this.
There should be more legal interpretation and drafting but the difficulty here is politics. Neither side of politics is daring to take on organised Religion because of the adherence of so many dumb people who couldn’t care less about other less fortunate people – unless it hits home to them!!
Give it a rest.
You are not even trying to understand. Your use of ‘they’ instead of ‘it’ proves that all of this discussion is going way over your head. Pay attention!: The association they have formed to play that fixture is not sued and cannot be sued. How is that not obvious? If there is any civil action as a result of the match they play only one or more of the natural persons are sued, as themselves, each named in the complaint.
If it was a professional team set up as registered business then that entity could be sued in its own right without naming any natural person. But some casual group that come together for a scratch game cannot be sued for itself. As far as the law concerned it is not a person, there is only several natural persons.
and yet the church is able to own land…..
Indeed. It does so through bodies (trusts, wholly owned subsidiaries etc.) set up for that purpose that it still controls. This has all sorts of advantages both for tax purposes and to erect effective firewalls to prevent any legal liabilities incurred having more than limited local effect. This is not an example of the church being terribly clever or getting special treatment, it is the way all large organisations protect themselves and minimise their tax bills. I’m not saying it is right. In fact it stinks. But that is how the world is.
David Marr put it so neatly. Put his career ahead of children. It is truly repellent, that his “godly” eulogists happily put to one side, the hundreds of lives he destroyed. St Marys is taking a risk, sheltering his remains.
Lying in state… as he did in life.