The Prince (Updated Edition): Faith, Abuse and George Pell

women.

1

FIRST CAB ON THE RANK

The script was bare. Take him away, please, said the judge, and George Pell picked up his stick, nodded to the guards fore and aft, and walked through a blank door at the end of the dock, into the underworld.

On his last day of freedom Pell drew a crowd. The world knew where to come and the court was packed. Watching in that throng were the Catholic women who have turned out at all the inquiries and trials along this road, bearing witness to the lives destroyed by their church. Somewhere in the silent court one voice was raised to curse the departing cardinal. We dispersed. Helicopters with television crews hovered, hoping for a shot of Pell in a prison van. They were thwarted. He was on a journey of only three blocks to Melbourne’s city prison, where he would live alone in a cell twenty-three hours a day for the next six months. His incarceration would be interrupted only briefly as he sat in the Court of Appeal while his lawyers attacked the jury’s verdict. Ten days before that court announced its decision, a letter in Pell’s name was posted on the internet. He did not deny it was his. My faith in our Lord, like yours, is a source of strength, it read. The knowledge that my small suffering can be used for good purposes through being joined to Jesus’ suffering gives me purpose and direction.

Suffering was not the key to his mighty career – not his own suffering, anyway. All the way to the Vatican, George Pell preached the sex rules of his faith. Intransigence made him a celebrity. Standing up to the zeitgeist, demanding obedience, listing sins and condemning sinners kept him in the news. As a priest, a bishop and a cardinal he poured his energies into combating contraception, homosexuality, genetic engineering, divorce, gay marriage and abortion. And from Ballarat to the Eternal City, he sang the praises of priestly celibacy. No sex is sacred. No sex is an offering to Christ. No sex demonstrates our first love is God. No sex leaves the heart undivided. No sex releases our spirits in the service of man. Forswearing sex turns each priest into another Christ called to spiritual paternity through the sacraments …

But a Melbourne jury found Pell guilty of forcing a choirboy to suck his penis in 1996. He has always denied the charge. Not so long ago, nothing much would happen to a bishop forcing himself on little boys. Complaints to the church would get nowhere. Perhaps he would be censured but no one would call the police. That was forbidden absolutely by Rome. The evil of clergy abusing children – in truth, old and familiar evil – was dealt with quietly to protect the prestige of a mighty faith. And to a remarkable extent, politicians and police went along with this. From Boston to Bogotá, Vienna to Mexico City, the church was left to look after the crimes of its own. Children were destroyed. Silence reigned.

Pell found himself in the dock in Melbourne in 2018 because this old pattern of complicity had broken down in Australia. It took time. For nearly thirty years, as abuse came to light and public anger grew, politicians continued to back the church. When Pell provoked an outcry by walking the paedophile Gerald Ridsdale to court, the premier of Victoria hosed down calls for a royal commission. When Pell was first accused of abusing boys himself, the prime minister blocked calls for a royal commission into the churches and children. When a former Anglican archbishop was forced to resign as governor-general after defending an abusive priest, his own church called for a national inquiry. John Howard again refused, and Pell concurred: It is not at all clear to me that we need a royal commission. After a nine-year inquiry uncovered the rot in Ireland, Pell was on hand to claim no such investigation was needed here. Ireland is not Australia.

But after Ireland, the political protection offered the churches in Australia began to falter. How such old understandings break down is all but impossible to track. A few cracks appear, a floor sags, and one day the whole house collapses. News broke from time to time that victims in America were suing the church for millions. This couldn’t be disguised: the money was proof of grave failings. Then the sins of the church in Ireland entered the local imagination. Ireland is the mother country of Australian Catholicism. The crimes of the Irish clergy were not all in the past and their concealment was contemporary. A week after the publication of a report in July 2011 on the abuse of children in the diocese of Cloyne, the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, delivered a blast against the church heard around the world:

The Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism … the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or managed to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s ear of the heart … the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.

Broken by this time was an old pattern of Catholic police in Australia handling discreetly the crimes of Catholic priests. So often, instead of being charged, paedophile clergy were simply reported to their bishops. Not anymore. Key to the new accountability of the church was the arrival on the scene of well-trained, determined and secular police. A year after Cloyne, pressure on the Victorian government to hold an inquiry became irresistible when The Age published a confidential police report accusing the Catholic Church of protecting paedophiles and showing little sympathy for their victims. Victoria Police linked forty suicides in the state to abuse by half a dozen priests and brothers. Detective Sergeant Kevin Carson wrote: It would appear that an investigation would uncover many more deaths as a consequence of clergy sexual abuse.

The premier, Ted Baillieu, ordered a parliamentary inquiry in 2011. Pell gave evidence. So did Victoria Police. They accused the Melbourne archdiocese of hindering investigations, protecting priests, silencing victims and failing to proactively seek out offenders. By this time, police in several states were attacking the church for protecting paedophiles in its ranks. Peter Fox, a disgruntled detective chief inspector in Newcastle, New South Wales, wrote an open letter to Premier Barry O’Farrell on 12 November 2012:

I can testify from my own experience that the church covers up, silences victims, hinders police investigations, alerts offenders, destroys evidence and moves priests to protect the good name of the church. None of that stops at the Victorian border … the whole system needs to be exposed; the clergy covering up these crimes must be brought to justice and the network protecting paedophile priests dismantled. There should be no place for evil or its guardians to hide.

When O’Farrell announced a modest inquiry into the troubles in Newcastle, fresh cries for a royal commission rose on all sides. Pell counterattacked, first in a feisty interview he gave The Australian and the next day in his weekly column in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph. In St Mary’s Cathedral that morning he preached against royal commissions and told the press on the steps afterwards that matters were in hand. The church had apologised and offered victims redress. I think it needs to be demonstrated that there is maladministration and corruption on a wide scale before there is any general royal commission.

The prime minister, Julia Gillard, was with world leaders in Bali. She told a press conference at Nusa Dua she was concerned about the Fox letter and might have something more to say when she was home in a couple of days. By the time she returned to Canberra there was an avalanche of calls from Labor backbenchers, political grandees like Malcolm Fraser and independent MPs Tony Windsor and Nick Xenophon for a commission. It was a weekend of formalities: the prime minister was entertaining the Prince of Wales and attending Remembrance Day ceremonies at the War Memorial. On the Monday morning, Gillard appeared in her office with her mind made up. I don’t think anyone else would have done it – not Howard or Rudd, says Michael Cooney, one of her advisers at the time. She is less clubbable than those guys, not constrained by blokey top-end-of-town thinking. She’s not from the Catholic Labor tradition. She’s chapel and union … it wasn’t the cover-ups that drove her. The PM wasn’t renowned for displays of emotion or empathy, but I believe she called the commission because of the abuse of children far more than the abuse of privilege. And she was never someone to kick the can down the road. Things were best fixed now.

Gillard’s colleagues offered no resistance. Discussion that morning centred on solving the constitutional and logistical problems that lay ahead. Every state and territory would have to back the plan. The commission would examine every church’s, every charity’s and every institution’s handling of child abuse across Australia. At some point, Pell’s office was warned of what was to come. At 5.40 pm, perilously late for television news crews, Gillard called a press conference. She began: I will be recommending to the governor-general the establishment of a royal commission into institutional responses to instances and allegations of child sexual abuse in Australia.

The cardinal was beaten. Next day, 13 November 2012, he called the press to Polding House, the fortress tower in the Sydney CBD that is the headquarters of the archdiocese. On his dark suit he wore insignia of both church and state: a cross and the gold pin of a Companion of the Order of Australia. Once he had settled and the cameras were running, he began to read from a typed sheet of paper. What had to be done had to be done. In the louche talk of the press and the police, it’s called eating a shit sandwich:

The Catholic bishops of Australia have welcomed the royal commission, which was announced by the prime minister last night. We think it’s an opportunity to help the victims; it’s an opportunity to clear the air, to separate fact from fiction. The first thing I would like to do is to repeat what I and the church leadership have said for the last sixteen years, which is that we are not interested in denying the extent of misdoing in the Catholic Church. We object to it being exaggerated; we object to being described as the only cab on the rank …

But under questioning, the carefully crafted good work of his opening rhetoric fell apart. The cardinal was unrepentant. He was there to defend his patch. The real victim in all this was the Catholic Church and its enemy was the press. He had a point: very little of this scandal would have emerged but for newspaper and television investigations. Over thirty years, beginning with scattered reports of apparently isolated outrages, paedophile abuse by priests and religious had become one of the biggest stories in the world. But Pell thought it was time for the media to abandon the issue – in the interests of the victims themselves. To what extent are wounds simply opened by the rerunning of events which have been reported not only once but many times previously?

His detachment was astonishing. So was the undercurrent of anger as reporters grilled him about his own record of dealing with paedophilia in Catholic ranks. For the most part he was lofty and cool, but once or twice under fire showed real passion. The seal of the confessional is inviolable, he said, rolling the word on his tongue. Inviolable. Journalists crowded into that plain room could not believe what they were seeing. The cardinal was floundering. This man had been a big figure in Rome since the time of John Paul II. He had faced down journalists before, but he was now falling apart in front of the cameras. The impact on television that night was terrible. Old political allies distanced themselves. Pell’s faith that he had the public on his side proved a delusion. The Fairfax/Nielsen poll was in the field in the nights following publication of the Fox letter, and in all his years as a pollster Nielsen director John Stirton had never seen such a result: support for the royal commission was running at 95 per cent.

The day she was toppled months later, Gillard listed the royal commission among the achievements of her embattled government. Extravagant claims were never her thing but before she left her last press conference, she allowed herself a big prediction: This royal commission is now working its way around the country. I believe it will have many years of work in front of it. But it will change the nation.

Pell’s high hopes that other faiths would prove worse offenders were dashed. Four years after that untidy press conference in Polding House, the royal commission set out the appalling numbers: two-thirds of those who had come to them complaining of abuse in faith-based institutions had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church. The commission had gathered all the surviving records of complaints of abuse held by the church’s dioceses, orders, schools and hospitals. Between January 1980 and February 2015, 4444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse … to ninety-three Catholic Church authorities. These claims related to over 1000 separate institutions. Nearly 80 per cent of the victims were little boys. Their average age at the time of their abuse was twelve. Among the alleged perpetrators were 572 priests.

One was George Pell. As the release of these commission findings in early 2017 provoked uproar in Australia, Pell was an intimate adviser to Pope Francis, a great prince of the church, the first treasurer of the Vatican in its history and about to be charged with multiple counts of child sex abuse by