LORD HIGH EVERYTHING ELSE
Probably the most popular actor was George Pell as Pooh-Bah, who sustained his part as Lord High Everything Else from start to finish with never a blemish and was responsible for many a laugh.
St Patrick’s College annual, 1958
There he is, always in the middle of the back row. The eyes inevitably find their way to him. He is tall and he is handsome, towering above the others. He’s rarely smiling, but then again, almost none of them are. His shoulders are broad, his hair shining and meticulously swept to the side. His eyes are wide set, clear chips of blue ice. Many of the others look like typical teenage boys—a little gormless, perhaps a bit pimply, with that pubescent thing where their teeth are ever so slightly too big for their heads. They’re the sons of Bungaree potato farmers, country funeral merchants, the freckled youth of what was still a pretty small town. You flick through the St Patrick’s College, Ballarat, annuals from the late 1950s and he’s always there, always the young-man-most-likely. In among the appeals to Good Catholic Parents for funds, and the advertisements for ‘Foot Rot and Foot Abscess Remedy for Sheep’, he’s there. Flick past the blurb for Harman Bros Catholic Emporium—‘Devotional Requirements for the Church, School and Home’—and you’ll find him. But George Pell doesn’t look like he’s from this place. Pell looks like a film star. There must have been some broken-hearted debutantes in Ballarat when Pell decided to go to the priesthood.
Here’s George, thirds in the rowing; there’s George, as school prefect. In his senior years at St Patrick’s, he was on the committee for the literary society and the debating team. He forcefully argued as first speaker that the State Should NOT Provide Free Secondary Education for all. And yes, his team won. A talented footballer who ‘used his height and weight in the ruck’ and would ultimately be selected to play for Richmond in the Victorian Football League. One of his former classmates put it more bluntly: ‘anyone in his way would get skittled’. See him sitting, turned out in white singlet emblazoned with a green shamrock, posing for the athletics team photo. His impressive dash in the hundred yards singled him out as one of two boys who helped St Pat’s take home the Ballarat School Sports Championship for the eighth successive year. He won the prestigious Purton Oratory for two years running. He seemed drawn to matters of national pride. For 1958, his topic was ‘Australia Fair’, for 1959, ‘An Australian’. He won a scholastic prize for Christian Doctrine, the Sir Hugh Devine prize for Impromptu Speaking, first prize at the Catholic Speechcraft Festival and was on the Our Lady’s Sodality Executive. The devoted sons of the Blessed Virgin met every Friday. He was also in cadets. And he wasn’t just in cadets. He was the Cadet Under Officer. While all the other boys in the 1958 photograph are standing, wearing berets, bare-handed, Pell is sitting in the middle, his fists clenched tightly on his lap in black leather gloves, wearing an officer’s peaked cap. His expression suggests he is not to be messed with.
But they were salad days too. Young George starred in a school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. ‘George’s superb acting and solo work singled him out as one of the best in the cast,’ the 1957 annual declared. He can be seen dressed as a policeman, between two other boys, who are dressed as ladies, each motioning to kiss him on either cheek. Those were innocent years. The following year, the editor of the annual was even more gushing about George’s role as a haughty and self-important nobleman, swathed in silken robes, in The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan operas were clearly all the rage in late-fifties Ballarat). ‘Probably the most popular actor was George Pell as Pooh-Bah,’ the annual’s editor, the Reverend Brother FB Archer wrote, ‘who sustained his part as Lord High Everything Else from start to finish with never a blemish and was responsible for many a laugh.’ Lord High Everything Else. Prophetic, one might think.
George Pell. Two short words, two soft syllables. George was a war baby—born on 8 June 1941. He shared his Christian name with the sitting King of the Commonwealth. He was much-wanted and much-loved—twin siblings had tragically died as babies before him. A sister, young Margaret, and a brother, David, followed him. His father, George Arthur Pell, was a goldmine manager who went on to own Ballarat’s Royal Oak Hotel. The pub was built in 1866 and its architectural austerity, uncharacteristic of the Victorian goldrush town, was offset by the salmon pink and mint green of the paintwork on its facade. ‘Always Buy Ballarat Bitter’, a sign on the side of the building declared. ‘Rich in Malt and Hops.’ A working man’s pub.
George Pell Senior was a heavyweight champion boxer and a non-practising Anglican, and from him it is said his son learned his pugilistic instincts and his street smarts. But George’s mother Margaret Lillian (nee Burke) was of Irish Catholic stock and regarded her religion with a great piety. A portrait of the great and formidable Archbishop Daniel Mannix hung on the wall in the Pell home and Pell had an auntie who had been given Mannix as a middle name. Pell’s official biographer, Tess Livingstone, wrote that every Wednesday Mrs Pell would attend the Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help with the local monsignor, Leo Fiscalini. Monsignor Fiscalini, as it happens, was to have a key role in Pell’s life, and later not an altogether positive one, many years after the older priest’s death. Like her son later would be, Margaret Pell was a student of the Catholic Democratic Labor Party (DLP) set up by politico-cultural warrior Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, BA in his journalist by-line, Bob to his friends. Mrs Pell undoubtedly sent up many Hail Marys for young George—who had twenty-four operations to attempt to remove a growth in his throat. Livingstone says the stoic young Pell used his convalescence to become an avid reader. So even from that early stage, Margaret Pell saw greatness in her boy, and he did not disappoint.
While he was initially offered a professional football contract to play for Richmond, young Pell joined the minor seminary instead while still at St Pat’s. Pell made it his mission to acquire as much knowledge as he could.
His bishop, James (or ‘Jimmy’ as some of his priests fondly called him) O’Collins, a former plumber who had risen through the ranks of the Church, had Pell marked out as special. Pell became head prefect at Corpus Christi seminary at Werribee on Melbourne’s western fringe. One of the priests who went through the college said it was at that time a ‘ghastly environment’: an ‘extremely regimented, authoritarian seminary and George fitted in perfectly’. And writing in the Jesuit journal Eureka Street in 1997, Pell’s classmate Brian Scarlett remembers a strict regime—rising at 5.55 a.m., being permitted nothing except water in between meals, no visitors at all allowed from the start of the seminary year until Easter, no radios and no newspapers, meals eaten in silence, lights out at 10 p.m. There was a list of banned texts, including, for reasons other seminarians are at a loss to explain, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Needless to say, copies were furiously smuggled in. ‘Another irritant was the discovery that Fragonard’s The Swing, a romantic piece of frippery in which a couple of gallants look at the ankles of a girl on a swing—had been excised from a book in the library,’ Scarlett writes. The height of daring was to sneak out and hitchhike to Geelong for a cheeky hamburger, to short-sheet a guy’s bed, or to carefully loosen the lid of a salt shaker in the hope that it might tumble out and spoil the unwitting victim’s soup.
Another trainee priest at the time, Paul Costigan, who was a year above Pell, hated it. During that time, there were about two hundred and eighty students, thirty or so to a year level. The youngest of them slept in three dormitories, which were converted classrooms, eight beds to a dorm. ‘It was absolutely freezing,’ Costigan remembers. The salty water had rusted the pipes in the heaters, so they were permanently on the blink. ‘It was the one advantage of wearing a soutane,’ Costigan says. ‘You were covered from head to foot so it helped with the cold.’ In order to cope, he would sneak out for cigarettes or hitchhike to Melbourne to the footy. ‘There were times when I walked out to the front gate on my own and thought “what the hell am I doing here?”’
Costigan says they were treated like children and underlying much of it was a fear of sex—be it homosexual or heterosexual. One of the professors would caution his young charges to ‘beware the Daughters of Eve’, much to their private mirth. Costigan remembers a spiritual director Duck Butt, whom they all called ‘Duck Butt’. Duck Butt would give them a warning. ‘He would tell us “be careful about going back to the parish tennis club”,’ Costigan, who was a tennis ace, remembers, ‘and, he would say, “if you do, don’t play mixed doubles” … That was the sort of ridiculous advice we were given.’
The trainee priests were also discouraged to befriend each other with a ‘No Particular Friendships’ rule. ‘I thought it was bullshit,’ says one of Pell’s contemporaries, Kevin Larkins. ‘Intimacy was an issue which was not only avoided, it was spoken against.’ As they got older and were allocated their own quarters, they weren’t even allowed in each other’s rooms. ‘Looking back at it, there was a huge fear in the authorities of homosexuality,’ Costigan says. Corpus Christi also had a noli tangere (Latin for ‘no touching’) rule. ‘I used to joke that that’s why we became such vigorous footballers,’ Costigan says with a laugh. ‘Because that was our chance to belt the daylights out of other students.’
Dr Michael Leahy, now a political philosopher who was two years behind Pell at Corpus Christi Werribee, says intellectually and socially the formation in the seminary fell short of need. ‘It was not the kind of preparation for a life in the secular world that was obviously ideal,’ Leahy says. ‘The idea that you could pop out of this isolated incubator and feel at home with the realities of everyday secular life was an illusion.’
His classmate Larkins says the seminarians remained caught in a sort of ‘underdeveloped adolescence’.
‘There was a tension between the threat of misery and the expectation of happiness because of the fact you were committed to an austere and isolated way of life,’ Leahy says. ‘No relationships with women outside visiting days. There was always that element of sacrifice that was present in your life. But nobody compelled you to be there. You were there because you were committed to becoming a priest and achieving a high ideal.’
Having said that, all of the men I spoke to, even those from later years, remarked on the incredibly close bonds they formed with one another there. So much so, that they all regularly catch up through a group called the CCC (Corpus Christi College) Guys. Many of the CCC Guys never got to the stage of being ordained, or left the priesthood behind, but still feel the pull of their seminary mates.
Leahy says despite being an environment of learning, the syllabus was selective and incomplete. ‘The study was slavishly dependent on the Catholic Church. It reduced philosophy and psychology to short chapters in a textbook. It reduced (intellectual) adversaries to one or two sentences of their position. It made no attempt to address the intellectual currents that were flowing through the world at the time.’
But as for Pell, well, Costigan says that he thrived at Corpus Christi. ‘He revelled in it,’ he says. ‘The whole pomp and ceremony of it. Wearing the soutane all the time.’ The seminarians said many were intimidated by Pell’s hulking presence and he rather enjoyed his head monitor role. ‘Look,’ another tells me, ‘George was known as “The Bully”. He was a bully on the football field, he was a bully all round in life.’
‘I never knew anyone who liked him,’ Costigan says. ‘But then, I probably never walked in those circles.’ He confesses that he was never a fan either. ‘I found him to be a very arrogant, overbearing, patronising type of person.’ But Leahy says he rather liked Pell and found the strapping boy from Ballarat had a good sense of humour at that time despite their ideological and theological differences now. ‘I was two years behind George at Werribee and [later] in Rome, and in many ways, we shared similar interests,’ Leahy remembers. ‘We were both intellectually inclined and reasonably good at sport. We were thrown together by conditions like that.’
Dr Brian Scarlett, who lectured in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne from 1975 to 2005, was in Pell’s year and even shared a room with him for six months. He says Pell was always civil, they got along well and never had a cross word that he remembers. He and Leahy both think it’s possibly an overstatement to call him a bully at that time.
‘George was a rules man and I don’t think he found it hard to be a rules man,’ Scarlett remembers. ‘He was a little censorious about those of us who had a more freewheeling attitude. I think he set his sights on a career in the clerical world very early on.’
Larkins, who was in Leahy’s year, says Pell took his role as head prefect seriously. ‘He did not take kindly to us and our attitude,’ Larkins says of his year level. ‘He thought we had no “year spirit”—you know, esprit de corps, like his mob supposedly did.’
Leahy says Pell then, as now, was ‘up for any sort of challenge and he relished challenges, be they physical or intellectual’. ‘It was a succeed-at-all-costs approach,’ Leahy says. ‘A great deal of his ego was built around living up to ideals and modelling himself on what he took to be heroic figures’.
‘Once he set out in pursuit of a cause—whether it be possession of the ball on the football field or winning a debate, he was unstoppable.
‘That was his style,’ Leahy says. ‘And that’s how, rightly or wrongly, he earned his reputation of being a bully. He could be utterly ruthless in his pursuit of any objective he set himself or, more importantly, any objective that the institutions upon which he depended had set for him as an ideal to be pursued.’
One of the more memorable examples of George the Unstoppable was on the football field. Whatever the social niceties of Corpus Christi, they played their footy hard. Larkins, who went on to become a senior health bureaucrat and now runs executive leadership courses, says it was so bruising that he copped five dislocated shoulders and had to leave his playing days behind. He and many of the others say none played harder on the field than Pell. He and Leahy remember one day when Pell ‘flattened’ another bloke on the field. The other players were aghast.
Larkins was umpiring that day. ‘George was like a behemoth,’ he remembers, laughing, ‘cutting a swathe through anyone who got in his way. And my whistle had absolutely no effect on him.’ Leahy let Pell have it, and Larkins says ‘Mick’ pounced on Pell and, as the smaller of the two, was ‘like a gnat on his back—George just shook him off’. Leahy says he then howled a series of expletives at Pell in defence of the player Pell knocked down. Leahy himself can’t remember exactly what he said, only that the language was colourful. But Larkins does. He reckons Leahy called Pell a ‘great cunt’. Larkins tried to stop the game, but he says Pell was having none of it.
In 2016, during an interview for Sky News with Andrew Bolt, Pell said something very telling about his football days. Bolt was quizzing him on his inability at times to show empathy and he referred to a ‘dimension’ of himself that might explain this. ‘I wasn’t a bad footballer,’ Pell said.
‘It sounds like you were a bit of a thug!’ Bolt countered.
‘Well, I was very fiery,’ Pell replied. ‘I’ve got a formidable temper which I almost never show. But the discipline that is needed for me not to lapse in that way, I think helps explain my wooden appearance.’
Leahy muses that young Pell was in fact a very ‘vulnerable’ person.
‘I think it’s a combination of his own psychology and that it’s borne of the kind of education in which greatness was thrust upon him. Because he has always had greatness thrust upon him, he has never been given the opportunity to develop any independence of judgement and behaviour. Opportunities were fenced in by the institutions that gave opportunities to him.’
Pell’s first cousin Henry (‘Hank’) Nolan had also earlier gone to Corpus Christi. Nolan would later retreat to the the Ballarat Diocese and would become a keeper of secrets. Nolan is now dead. Pell’s close friend in the seminary was Denis Hart—now Archbishop of Melbourne and Pell’s anointed successor. A tall, blond alumnus of the elite Melbourne Catholic boys’ school Xavier College, his nickname was ‘The Duke’ and he is one of the few people the seminarians remember being really close to Pell.
There was a strange phenomenon around the time that Pell went through Corpus Christi—and the years preceding and following. The institution turned out a remarkable number of priests who turned out to be paedophiles. It is something that in equal parts devastates and stumps the men who went through with them. Not one says he was remotely aware that men who would go on to commit such evil lurked in their midst and most are at a loss to explain exactly why it happened. The best they can offer is that as a supposedly celibate lifestyle, it offered a cover for people who were already disordered and would, in their later work, provide easy access to children. They say that that collided with the monastic lifestyle, which turned out young men grossly unprepared for life in the real world and the pastoral duties of dealing with real people. The whole topic of sexuality was, some like Larkins say, dangerously off limits. ‘If you look at the rest of the community, it is not comfortable with talking about death, but it talks about sex all the time. We were entirely comfortable with the notion of mortality, but we were not comfortable at all with the idea of sex.’ The combination of those factors created, the former seminarians suppose, a perfect storm. But at the time of their priestly training, none got wind of anything untoward.
Ballarat’s Gerald Ridsdale, probably the country’s worst serial paedophile priest, was five years ahead of Pell. So too was Wilfred ‘Billy’ Baker—a priest in the Melbourne Archdiocese and, say his fellow seminarians, ‘a nauseatingly pious creep’, who was later convicted of seventeen counts of indecent assault and gross indecency over a 20-year period. Michael Glennon, who was a few years behind Pell, was convicted five times with fifteen victims. He was charged with ten further counts just nine days before he died.
Glennon’s room-mate at the seminary was Terrence Pidoto—who went on to be convicted of eleven offences against four boys—although there were seven accusers. One was former altar boy Richard Jabara. Jabara told me that one night when he was a 13-year-old altar boy, Pidoto, by then a priest who had left the seminary years before, in fact took Jabara back to Corpus Christi to abuse him. He told Jabara, ‘“I’m going to take you where they make priests, which is a very special place, because you’re a very special boy” and when I got there, there were five seminarians waiting for me in their underwear.’ When young Jabara protested, Pidoto took him to the dining room. ‘He said, “We’re … we’re not going to leave until this is done”.’
Bob Claffey was another Ballarat seminarian three years behind Pell at Corpus Christi—he’s pleaded guilty to abusing fourteen children, although I personally know of more allegations against him. Like the others, he’ll die in jail. Paul Goldsmith was also a few years behind Pell and the archbishop refused to ordain him. But he went on to teach at a Marist Brothers school in Tasmania and committed sex crimes against twenty boys. He ultimately fled in 2012 to Tanzania, where he died in 2016.
Then there was Anthony Salvatore Bongiorno, a relatively mature-age trainee who was in Pell’s year and was something of a class clown. Tony Bongiorno was accused of abusing three boys in Melbourne. But, as was the case in many of the paedophile clergy trials, the Director of Public Prosecutions split the trials. Two juries, unaware of the other two complainants and given the historical nature of the case, acquitted Bongiorno. The third trial was thrown out, but the victims were later awarded Victims of Crime Compensation and payouts from the Church. Another intellectually disabled boy told police he was abused by Bongiorno, but his mother was murdered in a bookshop in Thornbury before charges could proceed. In 2013, police re-opened the cold murder case and Bongiorno, who had died in 2002, was at first a suspect in that cold case. But the DNA did not match up and Victoria Police announced in 2016 that he was no longer in the frame.
Leahy, Costigan, Scarlett and Larkins all say Bongiorno (not to be confused with Paul Bongiorno, the Channel Ten political journalist who also went through Corpus Christi and later worked as a priest in the Ballarat Diocese) was very matey in the seminary with Pell. ‘He was a good friend of George’s and they were great repartee partners and very much enjoyed each other’s company,’ Leahy says. One seminarian in Pell’s year seems to remember Pell and Bongiorno going on holiday together one summer. And when Pell was just entering his twenties, in the summers of 1961 and 1962, the seminarians remember that the pair volunteered at an altar boys’ camp in Smiths Beach at Phillip Island. That was to become a fateful trip for Pell, but not for a good forty years, when it threatened to bring him undone. As Scarlett and many others note, paedophilia is by its very nature secret and none of them were to know. Pell also hotly denies that he too can be counted in the number of clergy abusers who went through Corpus Christi. His alumni find it hard to reconcile the idea of the Pell they knew as a child abuser. He just didn’t seem the type.
Of course, at the time of writing, Pell, unlike the other seminarians, has never been charged or convicted of any crime. There is no legal judgement to prove that he isn’t as horrified as the rest of his innocent alumni at the people that the likes of Bongiorno became. He has made public statements expressing his sorrow at what went on.
Reflecting on the sordid group of sinners who have been convicted of multiple crimes many years later, it occurred to Leahy that, oddly, the paedophile set seemed to cope much better in the seminary than the others did. Working in prisons many years later, Leahy bumped into one of them regularly who was by that time an inmate and he said the institutional nature of the criminal justice setting similarly suited this man.
Pell’s classmates say that he, too, seemed very happy in the seminary although they had been equally convinced he was not, in the language they used at the time, ‘a shirt lifter’. Whatever he was, he flew much higher than many of his fellow seminarians. He set a clear-eyed focus on achieving greatness in his Church. He was clearly in many ways a remarkable young man.
After Corpus Christi, Bishop O’Collins sent young George to Propaganda Fide university to study Theology. It was, as Archbishop Fisher later put it, ‘Rome’s finishing school for priests’ and O’Collins was fond of sending his young charges there.
In the name of good fun, the seminarians had a sort of benign ritual for the guys they were sending off to the Holy City. After a footy match, they were thrown in a horse trough. Scarlett took photos of Pell and two other seminarians who were going to Propaganda being unceremoniously dunked. ‘We didn’t throw them into the horse trough at the same time,’ Scarlett says with a chuckle. The photograph shows Pell, with a good-humoured look of dismay on his face, flat on his back in the trough, long, muscled legs akimbo, outstretched arms trying to lift himself out. But when Scarlett published it in 1997, along with pictures of two other seminarians who were given dunkings, with a droll piece about seminary days in the popular Jesuit magazine Eureka Street, ‘George was not too happy,’ he says. Pell was by then Archbishop of Melbourne. Scarlett was surprised as he meant no malice and the article was not about Pell—he had simply used the photograph as an illustration. The pair met at an academic function soon after ‘and he said something about my being in rude health, with a heavy emphasis on “rude”,’ Scarlett says. ‘Perhaps he thought the photograph detracted from his dignity as a bishop. If I thought about it at all, I might have considered that it could enhance his credit as a man for all seasons.’
I spoke to one of the other young priests who studied at Propaganda Fide at the same time. ‘We all regarded George as very, very ambitious,’ said the former student of the university who was with Pell in the early 1960s. ‘George always took himself very seriously. He was very pompous and arrogant.’ Like some of the Corpus Christi seminarians, the Propaganda Fide student described Pell as a bully. ‘He could be very cutting with people,’ the former student said. ‘He ignored day-to-day dialogue. And if you disagreed with him, he would put you down.’
Leahy followed Pell to Propaganda and they would sit in the same lecture theatres for half of their time there. There were two key theologians—one a conservative pre–Vatican II scholar, the other a young leader of the progressive movement that was sweeping the city and the world.
As Pell himself told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse fifty years later, the 1960s ‘was a turbulent time’ in the Church and society in general—with the introduction of the contraceptive pill provoking profound social change that filtered through to the young scholars. The Second Vatican Council came to be known as ‘Vatican II’. Called by Pope John XXIII, it was an ecumenical council of Catholic leaders—the first of its kind in a century—which sat between 1962 and 1965. It introduced sweeping changes designed to bring the Church into the modern world—such as the Latin mass being replaced for the first time with English or the local language.
Paul Costigan’s brother Michael, who was also a Catholic priest but was a decade older than Paul and Pell, remembered meeting the ‘very tall and handsome’ Pell when he was sent as a journalist for a Catholic newspaper to cover the second Vatican Council. He remembers that it was an incredibly exciting time—it was, he says, the most exciting assignment he ever had.
Leahy was similarly thrilled by the revolutionary zeal. ‘During that time, virtually all of us Australians went through a conversion from a pretty conservative political and theological viewpoint,’ Leahy says. ‘By the end of all of our time there we had undergone a total conversion politically and theologically. George, well he drank from the same well as the rest of us.
‘He was a great ham. He would introduce us to the antics of the conservative theologian by taking him off in the most entertaining way. When George graduated from Rome, he had come closest he has ever come to achieving some liberation from the conservative views that had been thrust upon him.’
Pell himself remembered this many years later when giving evidence to the Royal Commission. ‘There was a whiff of revolutionary spirit about,’ the Cardinal recalled. ‘A lot of good people decided to follow other paths,’ he said, referring to the many trainee priests who abandoned their vocation either before or after ordination.
While Pell sniffed the wind, he did not go with the revolution. Young Pell, ordained a priest at St Peter’s Basilica in December 1966 to the strains of Bach’s Fantasia in G, would embrace rigid orthodoxy and reject the primacy of the conscience. And, like his old mentor and benefactor Bishop O’Collins, he embraced BA Santamaria.
Eric Hodgens, a retired priest of the Melbourne Diocese, says O’Collins sent Pell, whom he describes as a ‘conservative warrior’, to Oxford ‘to get a doctorate in order to joust with the progressives on his return’. Pell’s thesis was on ‘The Exercise of Authority in Early Christianity from About 170 to 270’. ‘Jim [O’Collins] wanted someone who could take on the likes of Max Charlesworth—a leading academic progressive voice,’ says Hodgens. And how Pell thrived.
Pell was based at the Jesuit college of Campion Hall. His great friend at Oxford was an Anglican, Peter Elliott, who was, like Pell, another anti-communist Santamaria devotee. Elliott subsequently converted to Catholicism with Pell as his sponsor. Livingstone reports that in the 1960s on campus the firm friends were known by the Marxist set as ‘The Big Australian Bastard’ and ‘The Little Australian Bastard’. The little one, Elliott, is now an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne. In 2015, Bishop Elliott told The Age he did ‘consultancy work’ in the field of exorcisms for Catholics who have been possessed by the devil.
In 1971, the publican’s son returned to Ballarat with a doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford. ‘I was one of the first, perhaps the first, Catholic priest to take a DPhil in the theology faculty since The Reformation,’ Pell years later reminded the Royal Commission early in his evidence. The Reformation in the sixteenth century, that is.
The good burghers of Ballarat could not have been more proud of their favourite son. It’s impossible to overstate how large this young man loomed in the town’s consciousness upon his return.
Pell’s brilliant career in the country diocese started modestly enough. It must have been a huge comedown for young Father Pell to be awarded a doctorate at Oxford and then to make his way to the tiny, isolated parish of Swan Hill at the north of Victoria’s Western District, where he was appointed assistant priest. But by 1972–73, he was back in Ballarat, living at the presbytery of St Alipius, the Ballarat East parish where his parents had been married. That was before St Alipius earned its reputation as the centre of a culture of rampant child abuse, both physical and sexual, by a ring of paedophile Christian Brothers and the predatory parish priest, Gerald Ridsdale.
Pell lived out his thirties and early forties there from 1973 to 1983. He infamously shared the presbytery with Ridsdale for a year and much has been made of the ‘optics’ of this, but even his harshest critics wonder what he could have known in a busy presbytery where there were constantly clerics and other visitors coming and going. Most priests think it is utterly simplistic to entertain the notion that he definitely knew what was happening there. Terry Laidler, who was also a priest in the 1970s but left the priesthood and became an ABC broadcaster, shares this view. ‘It is quite plausible to me that he didn’t know [what was going on in that house],’ Laidler says. Laidler, too, had lived in busy presbyteries like St Alipius and says it was quite possible to hardly see the other priests at all. Having said that, the presbytery was also next door to St Alipius Boys’ School, where the paedophile brothers terrorised the children in their care. Pell later acknowledged he’d heard vague rumours about brothers being over-affectionate, such as kissing children on the lips. But he says that was it.
During those years, like the rest of his career, Pell packed an enormous amount of work and achievements into his life. Andrew Collins, a survivor of child sexual abuse in Ballarat, was a family friend of Pell’s. His grandmother lived on the same street as Pell Senior’s pub. ‘I remember my grandmother, she used to work at the presbytery,’ Collins recalls. ‘She said to me, “If you ever have any trouble with the Church, George is the man to go to”.’
Collins’ friend, Peter Blenkiron—also a survivor of abuse in the diocese, in his case, at Pell’s old school of St Patrick’s—also remembers Pell well at both his primary school, Villa Maria, and his high school, St Pat’s. ‘Not only did he work the room,’ Blenkiron says, ‘he worked the diocese. He was in all the places all the time, getting well known, pushing himself.’
Pell became director of Aquinas College—the Catholic teachers’ college. He was there for ten years and was considered an excellent administrator who boosted the profile of the campus enormously and enhanced its academic credentials.
‘He has always been a politician—an ecclesiastical politician,’ says Father Hodgens. ‘His appointment [to Aquinas College] introduced him to wheeling and dealing with governments and unions.
‘Ballarat’s Aquinas College became a campus of the newly created Australian Catholic University with George as a key participant in the negotiations between Church and government.’
As one senior member of a religious order with similar academic qualifications to Pell noted to me, because Pell had not worked as an academic before, this would have been enormously challenging and busy work. That factor led the priest to believe Pell’s much later evidence in the Royal Commission that he was too tied up with his work at Aquinas to notice or have time to turn his mind to the sexual abuse crisis that was unfolding in the diocese under his nose.
When Bishop O’Collins was succeeded by Ronald Mulkearns, Pell was Mulkearns’ Episcopal Vicar for Education—responsible for schools across the diocese. He was also on Mulkearns’ board of consultors, whom the Bishop consulted on priestly appointments and movements throughout the geographically huge diocese—which sprawled right across Victoria’s Western District to the South Australian border. Pell was also for five of those years editor of the diocesan magazine, Light.
He coached the rowing team at his alma mater, St Patrick’s College. And, of course, he managed to say mass at St Alipius every Sunday and St Martin’s in the Pines during the week and to be on a confessional roster. In the warmer months, he would spend the afternoons and evenings at the Eureka Pool, where he’d swim laps and then horse around with the boys in the pool. It’s exhausting just thinking about it, but Father Pell was up for it all. If you speak to any Catholic who was a child at the time in Ballarat, they remember him as this seemingly omnipresent character, towering over everyone else, with this booming voice, just everywhere. Certainly, several pages from his diary tendered to the Royal Commission and penned in his distinctive hand are packed with events in Ballarat and in far-flung parts of the diocese, not to mention his trips back and forth to Melbourne. He was a mover and a shaker. A connected, ambitious, competent and fiercely ambitious man. The publican’s son was going places.
All the while, a crisis was brewing. And Pell was living, working, praying, right in among it. He furiously maintains that he had almost no idea of what was going on. But, says the town’s survivor community, he would say that.