With the sudden death of George Pell the Church has lost a remarkable and controversial voice. His last public appearance was as a concelebrant at Pope Benedict’s funeral on 5 January; he died of complications following what should have been a routine operation five days later.
Born during the Second World War in Ballarat, Victoria, Pell’s mother was a devout Catholic. His father was a non-practising Anglican, but he was also a publican. The young Pell’s experience of bar work in the Australian outback laid the foundations for his later social ease with people of all backgrounds – but also perhaps his distinctive robustness.
A country lad done good, Pell overcame significant childhood illness to become a heavyweight boxing champion and a ruckman for his college’s Aussie-rules football team. Precociously intelligent and physically imposing, in 1959 he signed up to play professionally with the Richmond Tigers. It was a great surprise to many when his sporting ambition gave way to vocation and he entered seminary instead.
Bishop Jimmy O’Collins of Ballarat soon recognised that Pell was an uncommonly talented student and sent him to Rome to complete his studies. O’Collins was himself no stranger to Vatican politics and soon his protégé found himself sitting in the Pope’s private office. At the end of their conversation Paul VI presented the young seminarian with a small statue of St John the Baptist. It was an encounter as rare then as it would be today.
After ordination Pell was sent to Oxford, where he completed a doctorate in church history – he would later become Patron of the University’s Newman Society. He developed a deep love for England and particularly reveled in having been the first Catholic chaplain at Eton since the Reformation.
Returning to Australia in 1971, Pell served briefly in rural parishes and in 1985 was appointed rector of Corpus Christi seminary, his alma mater in Melbourne. He found it in grave need of reform, observing with characteristic dryness that “in my day we had night prayers and lights out. Now we have light prayers and nights out.” His efforts to restore discipline were interrupted when he was appointed an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese.
While Archbishop Frank Little recognized Pell’s gifts, there was not much personal warmth between them and Little did not overburden his new auxiliary with too many duties. At the time John Paul II, still vigorous and energetic, was calling for a sincere revival of traditional Catholic faith and practice and Pell threw himself wholeheartedly into the effort. He became its Antipodean standard-bearer and a focus of hope for many troubled Australian Catholics.
Pell was blunt, direct and enjoyed the limelight, but he was also articulate and knew how to defend himself in a hostile situation – of which there would be many. His vigorous public defence of traditional Catholic values brought him to papal attention, and in 1997 he became Archbishop of Melbourne. He immediately returned to his plans for reformation of the provincial seminary, and announced his intention for their implementation.
Pell was not overly distressed when most of the seminary staff resigned en masse. The clergy of Melbourne were mostly divided along ideological lines and did not necessarily welcome his appointment; there was a sense of relief in the archdiocese when he was translated to Sydney four years later. He was made a cardinal in 2003 – with the suburban concrete titular church of Santa Maria Domenica Mazzarello – and in 2008 he was instrumental in bringing Benedict XVI to Australia for World Youth Day.
In 2014 Pope Francis called Pell to Rome as Prefect of the newly-formed Secretariat for the Economy of the Holy See. His brief was to reform the Vatican finances, a notoriously oblique area of the Church’s life. His sporting reputation endured; Pell the prelate was often accused of practising church politics as if he were in the boxing ring or on the football field, and he immediately moved into the former office of the President of the Vatican Bank.
In contrast to the late Pope Benedict’s softly-spoken-professor profile, Pell came across as a bruiser whose opinions were issued not sotto voce but instead like a well-honed trumpet blast. He was charming in private, but by his own admission could get into a temper if things did not go his way. He knew his mind, and while it made for strong leadership many from whom he might profitably have taken counsel often found themselves brusquely swept aside.
Pell made early headway as Prefect, but soon ran into entrenched opposition. Some resented his manner, and at times his directness and assertiveness did not respect curial conventions. It has been widely suggested that others may have had darker reasons for resisting his attempts at reform, and while he was preparing to redouble his efforts he was arrested and charged with the historic sexual abuse of two children in the sacristy of his cathedral in Melbourne.
Those close to Pell – and plenty who hated him, too – regarded the specifics of the accusations as implausible to the point of absurdity, and the details that emerged as the now-notorious process unfolded did little to change that view. Nevertheless, many others were prepared to believe the worst of an unpopular conservative who in their eyes represented a discredited and humiliated Church whose scandalous failings in the protection of children had been exhaustively reported – for during thirty years Pell had become Australia’s public voice of Catholic conservatism.
He was an unstinting advocate for conservative politics, traditional morality, and the old ways of doing things – he happily celebrated the Tridentine Rite and occasionally wore the cardinalatial cappa magna with its flowing scarlet train. He had both the courage of his convictions and the articulation to make them widely known, and he was untroubled by the fact that his hard-line moral and theological positions infuriated liberals inside the Catholic Church and in wider Australian society.
Pell had already faced considerable criticism for his role in the handling of abuse allegations in Victoria; the Australian government’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse concluded that he had questions to answer, which he disputed. Much of the public censure revolved around his perceived support for the former priest and later convicted paedophile Gerald Risdale, whom in 1993 lawyers had asked Pell to accompany to court.
Things might have played out very differently had they turned up separately. It quickly transpired that Risdale’s alleged offences were far graver than Pell had been told, and the footage of both men arriving at court together became a millstone around Pell’s neck for the rest of his life. Despite his protestations, much of the Australian media relentlessly painted him as a defender and associate of perverts.
The mud stuck, and many Australians ought probably to admit that Pell’s conviction brought more than a hint of Schadenfreude. That Pell’s scalp had been claimed was too easily regarded as just desserts for the Australian Church’s historic and collective failure to act against abusive priests, which he was seen to embody.
In 2020, however, the Australian High Court upheld his appeal against the conviction with a rare, unanimous and damming judgement of the court’s full bench which raised very grave doubts about the efficacy, competence and impartiality of Victoria’s criminal justice system. Pell’s former disgrace turned instead into a national one, and comments about kangaroo courts did not seem very funny.
Pell was therefore able to retire to Rome as something of a martyr. Receiving him in audience on his return, Pope Francis thanked him for his “witness” and later referred to the “calumny” that had prevented him from completing his financial reforms. “He is a great man and we owe him much,” the Pope said.
Thereafter Pell only occasionally raised his head above the parapet. In 2021 he demanded that German bishops be censured for teaching that homosexuality might be permissible and reiterated his own uncompromising views. Again, the dry wit came to the fore: “they call them gay, but most of them are as miserable as we are.” Shortly before he died he referred to the Synodal Way as “a toxic nightmare”, and asked “what is one to make of this potpourri?”
He also published his remarkable three-volume Prison Journal, on which he began work when he was, as he put in, “in the clink”. While it underscores Pell’s prodigious talents and his orderly and methodological mind – to say nothing of the depth of his personal faith – it also gives the lie to how he lost the sympathy of the Australian public to the extent that it broadly welcomed a gross miscarriage of justice as long as it brought him down.
“Naturally I feel uneasy and embarrassed being compared to the Lord,” he wrote, before comparing the prospect of years in prison to the Crucifixion. While he acknowledged the scandal of abuse and its devastating effect on victims, he also remarked that “The Royal Commission became more anti-Catholic as it progressed and the televising of the hearings produced something like the Soviet Union show trials.” He could sometimes be tone deaf.
Nevertheless his time in prison, some of which was spent in solitary confinement, changed him. “It wasn’t horrendous,” he told the Catholic Herald shortly after his release. “It was thoroughly unpleasant.” The old fire was still there – warm, gregarious and social – but it had been softened and spiritualized. He seemed not to resent his accusers and those who had weighted the scales of justice against him. Rather, he claimed that the experience had drawn him closer to God.
The heavy humiliation allowed qualities of tenderness and gentleness to come much more to the fore than had been apparent earlier. He spent his last couple of years mainly in his apartment in Rome, a city that he loved, where he welcomed old and new friends. Nevertheless his long shadow still falls, and even in death he is likely to continue to be one of Australia’s most polarising figures.
Admirers, detractors, colleagues and acquaintances: everyone had a view on the most powerful man ever to have risen through the ranks of the Australian Catholic Church. He was a towering worldwide influence – literally and metaphorically – in ecclesiastical and public settings, and in the course of a life spent in the service of the Church he made many friends and many enemies. No one was indifferent about George Cardinal Pell.
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