Cardinal George Pell, charged by Australian police today, 29 June, with multiple “historical sexual assault offences” is a towering figure in Australian Catholic history.
Only Archbishop Daniel Mannix - Pell's predecessor as Archbishop of Melbourne from 1917-63, whose portrait hung in the Pell family home in the Victorian Goldfields city of Ballarat - can compare with him among Australian Catholic prelates for his ability to attract passionate admirers and equally passionate foes. Like most towers, both men have attracted lightning strikes.
Mannix, a Corkman who was a tribal chieftain for many of Australia's large Irish Catholic community, was threatened with deportation over his successful opposition to Conscription during the First World War, earned a free trip to Penzance in a Royal Navy destroyer in 1920 when it stopped his ship landing him in his homeland during a time of high tension in Ireland, and as late as the 1950s helped split the Australian Labor Party over the influence of Communists in the trade unions, when many Catholics set up their own party.
But even Mannix did not lead Catholics in Australia's two biggest cities, Sydney (2001-14) and Melbourne (1996-2001), as Pell has done. Mannix never had to submit to the gruelling scrutiny of a parliamentary inquiry and Royal Commission, as Pell has done on four occasions - twice in person. And Mannix never stood aside from his duties, as Pell has now done, and did in 2002 soon after becoming Archbishop of Sydney, when accused of sexually molesting a 12-year-old boy in 1961. (An inquiry established under the Church's National Committee for Professional Standards, conducted by a non-Catholic retired Victorian Supreme Court judge Alec Southwell, QC, failed to be satisfied that the complaint had been established, though Mr Southwell remarked that both Pell and the complainant gave the impression of speaking honestly.) Archbishop Pell, who denied that allegation as he has the more recent claims against him, returned to his duties within two months and the following year, 2003, he was made a Cardinal by Pope St John Paul II.
A former Federal Government minister and Australian Ambassador to Italy, Amanda Vanstone, wrote in The Age newspaper in Melbourne on 30 May: "The media frenzy surrounding Cardinal George Pell is the lowest point in civil discourse in my lifetime. I'm 64. What we are seeing is no better than a lynch mob from the dark ages.
"For the record I try to live by Christian values but do not regard myself as a believer. I have a deep distrust of organised religion. Cardinal Pell and I have widely and perhaps wildly divergent views on a number of matters. So what? Having differing views isn't meant to be a social death warrant for the one with the least popular views. It's a meant to be one of the markers of a truly civilised society. If there's a prosecution simply to assuage public opinion that would be a travesty of justice. It would mean senior law enforcement can't tell the difference between the public interest and what might interest the public. Using the media to persecute someone is not the moral equivalent of using the law to prosecute them. Still, bottom feeders often delude themselves."
For her part Pell's most recent biographer, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Louise Milligan, wrote two days later that cries of "trial-by-media" and "witch-hunt" rang hollow.
Milligan, the author of Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell (Melbourne University Press), also denied her work was an anti-Catholic exercise. "The same Church my father loves and remains committed to, that I grew up in? The same Church inhabited by the very good men of the cloth to whom I spoke for this book, who care about their parishioners so deeply? The same Church that inspired my Irish Catholic Nana to send my Mum down the street to give money to the poor people on Christmas Day even though she had barely enough to keep her eleven children? No.
"If Cardinal Pell is charged, my book will be withdrawn from circulation in the Victorian jurisdiction and will only be reissued at the conclusion of that process.
"George Pell is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but that does not mean that his accusers deserve to be summarily dismissed in the way that children almost always had been until the Royal Commission turned decades of silence and obfuscation and failure-to-believe on its head."
George Pell was, in a sense, born to power on 8 June 1941. Ballarat, though a provincial city in Victoria, attained prosperity and prominence in Australian affairs through the Gold Rush of the 1850s (the future cardinal's father, also George, was manager of a gold mine and an Anglican, while his mother was of Irish Catholic descent). Four of Australia's 29 Prime Ministers - and more than a few of its state premiers - were born and educated in or near the city, or represented it in Parliament.
He was educated at two of Ballarat's leading Catholic institutions, Loreto Convent and St Patrick's College, the latter a Christian Brothers school for boarders and day students famous for producing priests and footballers that became the subject of public hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which is to complete its work in December after almost five years.
George Pell studied for the priesthood at Corpus Christi College in Werribee, a Jesuit-run seminary outside Melbourne established by Mannix almost 40 years earlier, and in 1963 - as the Second Vatican Council concluded its first year under a new Pope, Paul VI - he was sent to Propaganda Fide College in Rome. He was ordained for the Diocese of Ballarat by Cardinal Agagianian in St Peter’s Basilica on 16 December 1966. The following year, he began four years at Campion Hall, Oxford, working on his Doctorate of Philosophy in Church History.
He spent relatively little time in pastoral work on his return to Ballarat diocese, working as assistant priest in Swan Hill, on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, in 1971-72 and at St Alipius Ballarat East - also the subject of the Royal Commission's inquiries - from 1973-83. His main roles were as Director of Ballarat's Aquinas Campus of the Institute of Catholic Education from 1974-84, Principal of the Institute, Episcopal Vicar for Education in Ballarat diocese and as a founding member of the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria. It was during this time that he served as a consultor to Ballarat's Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, whose 26-year episcopate was skewered during the Royal Commission public hearings.
Mulkearns, who retired in 1997, apologised in February last year for the way he handled complaints of abuse in his diocese. Suffering from ill health, he told the Royal Commission by videolink: "There were problems with the priests in the diocese and I didn't seem to be handling them as well as I should have … And I'd like to say if I may that I'm terribly sorry that I didn't do things differently in that time." Mulkearns died in April 2016, aged 85.
In 1985, Pell's ascent to leadership in the Australian Church accelerated when he became Rector of Corpus Christi seminary for Victoria and Tasmania, relocated to the Melbourne suburb of Clayton, and two years later he was consecrated as an Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Melbourne with responsibility for the southern region of Australia's most populous diocese (Sydney had been split in 1986, with two new dioceses created, Parramatta and Broken Bay.) Pell's responses as regional bishop and Archbishop, and that of his predecessor in Melbourne Archbishop Sir Frank Little, to child sexual abuse by clergy were the subject of public hearings by the Royal Commission in 2015-16, with its case study report still to be released.
But he also helped establish Australian Catholic University, serving as its Foundation Pro-Chancellor from 1991-95, and chaired Caritas Australia, the Church’s agency for overseas development and relief, from 1988-97. His influence in the global Church also spread, with John Paul II nominating him in 1990 to the Synod of Bishops in Rome on the preparation of priests, the same year he became a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, bringing him into close proximity to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Little's resignation and Pell's succession as seventh Archbishop of Melbourne were announced on 16 July 1996 to a Church shocked by the abrupt transition. A month later, with St Patrick's Cathedral being renovated, the new Archbishop was installed in Melbourne's grand Royal Exhibition Building, which 95 years earlier had hosted the inauguration of Australia's first national Parliament by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V and Queen Mary).
Archbishop Pell took no time to make his mark. Perhaps most controversially, in October 1996, he instituted the Melbourne Response protocol for responding to claims of child sexual abuse in his archdiocese as his brother bishops prepared to launch the national protocol, Towards Healing.
He also made sweeping changes to the seminary, religious education for schools and had no hesitation entering debates within the Church and wider society in areas such as bioethics, gay rights, racism and gambling.
In February 1998, Archbishop Pell attended the Constitutional Convention in Canberra as a delegate appointed by the conservative Prime Minister John Howard and helped draft a model for a republic adopted by the Convention but rejected in a referendum the following year. In 2001, he addressed a joint sitting of the Victorian Parliament on the drug problem in society; 12 years later, he gave evidence to a committee of the same Parliament into religious institutions' response to child sexual abuse that was a precursor of the national Royal Commission.
In March 2001, John Paul II transferred Pell to Sydney, which for four of his five immediate predecessors had led to a red hat. In her admiring biography in 2002, Tess Livingstone wrote: "Nobody doubted the story circulating that Pope John Paul II, looking at a list of three other names provided to him to fill the vacancy in Sydney, said: 'I want Pell.'"
Here, too, Pell was quick to make his mark, establishing campuses of the University of Notre Dame Australia, founded in Western Australia, in Sydney and supporting an appeal for Campion College, Australia’s first Catholic liberal arts college.
Presenting a statue of Sir Thomas More to Australia’s oldest Parliament, that of New South Wales, for its 150th anniversary in 2006, Pell said: “We are paying tribute to More’s courage, to his adherence to principle, to his opposition to tyranny. He did this with few companions and little support.”
In 2008, he hosted Pope Benedict XVI and World Youth Day pilgrims, aided by the bishop who was to be his successor in Sydney, the Dominican Anthony Fisher. The lead-up to WYD was dominated by the controversy over child sexual abuse, with Melbourne couple Anthony and Chrissie Foster, two of whose daughters were abused by their parish priest, unsuccessfully seeking a meeting with the Pope. Anthony Foster, who was accorded a State Funeral for his advocacy for victims and their families on 7 June, the day before Pell's 76th birthday, was scathing about Pell, telling the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations in 2012: “In our interactions with the now Cardinal Archbishop Pell, we experienced a sociopathic lack of empathy typifying the attitude and responses of the Church hierarchy.”
Pope Francis called Pell to Rome - which had been long anticipated, though the post, Prefect of the new Secretariat for the Economy, was not - in 2014. As he was leaving Sydney, the Cardinal gave evidence to a public hearing of the Royal Commission.
Cardinal Pell's appearances at the Victorian parliamentary inquiry and the Royal Commission have been marked by unfortunate responses. Giving testimony to the Royal Commission by video from Rome in March last year, in the presence of survivors and their supporters who made the trip to the Eternal City, he said the offending by late Ballarat priest Gerald Ridsdale was "a sad story" but that "it wasn't of much interest to me". Ridsdale, now laicised and imprisoned, abused more than 50 children, some as young as four, and was protected by Mulkearns. Asked by Senior Counsel Assisting the Commission why Ridsdale's case was not of interest, Pell replied: "The suffering, of course, was real and I very much regret that but I had no reason to turn my mind to the extent of the evil that Ridsdale had perpetrated."
Pell was widely regarded as a confidant of Tony Abbott, a former seminarian who led the conservative coalition to power in 2013 and was replaced as Prime Minister by Malcolm Turnbull in a party room vote two years later. Their closeness may be exaggerated but both admired Bob Santamaria, who as a young man rose through Catholic Action in the 1930s to be a trusted associate of Mannix and, like Pell, was admired and detested within and beyond Catholic Australia. Santamaria, who never held public office, was an ardent foe of Communism and a key figure in the Labor Party split of the 1950s that brought down state governments and kept Labor out of power nationally and in Victoria and Queensland for decades.
In 1998, Pell and Prime Minister Howard visited Santamaria on his deathbed at Caritas Christi Hospice in Melbourne, next door to Mannix's old mansion, Raheen. After Santamaria died on Ash Wednesday, Pell paid tribute to him: "We are told that one sure mark of the false prophet is that all people speak well of him. In death, as in life, Bob Santamaria has triumphantly escaped such a fate."
PICTURE: Cardinal George Pell, prefect of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy, arrives for closing Mass of the Synod of Bishops on the family in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican last October
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