“I knew I’d got it dead right,” Fr Frank Brennan SJ tells us. “But I had to wait another 15 months for the unanimous judgment of the High Court of Australia. Meanwhile a lot of people inside and outside the Church said some very silly things.”
Frank Brennan has been a gingery, often contrarian figure in Australia for many years. His father was Chief Justice of Australia. Brennan, too, is a lawyer – and a formidable advocate. In 1995 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his service to Aboriginal Australians. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating famously referred to him as “the meddling priest”.

There was consternation when in February 2019 Brennan – who was known to have had strong-minded public disagreements with Cardinal George Pell – published articles in The Tablet and elsewhere questioning the unanimous verdict of a jury that Pell was guilty of abuse. After all the work to drag the Church out of its habits of obfuscation and denial, here was a prominent Catholic priest defending another Catholic priest who had been convicted of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choir boys.