THE AUXILIARY
Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!
Steerforth in David Copperfield
Ultimately, Ballarat was too small for George Pell and could scarcely contain his ambitions. As he launched into his forties, Pell’s positions mirrored those of the fabulously charismatic, theologically conservative Pole, Karol Wojtyla, who had been elected as Pope John Paul II in 1978. And so Pell, who continued to cultivate his Roman contacts, was being noticed. ‘By 1985 it was Ballarat’s turn to provide a rector for the [Corpus Christi] seminary. George got the job—another good career step,’ Father Eric Hodgens, who is older than Pell, remembers. So, Pell set off to Melbourne, the archdiocesan jewel in the Australian Church’s crown, to make his way in the world.
‘I think George has always been a political animal,’ Hodgens tells me. ‘His claim to fame has been his ability to be street-smart. He sniffs the wind and he knows which way to go. He’s a loyalist to the institution—you just keep the rules and you don’t ask why, you just keep them.’
Corpus Christi had now moved on from its bucolic Werribee mansion setting to drab suburban Clayton, but Pell rolled up his sleeves and got down to the business of getting some order back into the place—as far as he was concerned, it had abandoned the stricter protocols of his era and had adopted a more laissez-faire approach. Seminary numbers had halved since the beginning of the seventies and were in freefall. Pell’s biographer Tess Livingstone reports that Pell spent his two years there reinforcing practices like 7 a.m. masses and commitment to prayer. But while at times he crossed swords with many of his colleagues and students, he was right in line with Rome.
His discipline and obedience paid off. He was appointed Auxiliary Bishop in 1987. He would now be referred to as ‘His Grace’. His star had risen. His time had come. Some of his priestly colleagues were aghast—particularly since the word was that Archbishop Frank Little had, they said, put up other names to Rome and Pell wasn’t one of them. But it’s said that Rome told Archbishop Little that Pell had to be on the list. From that time on, say the priests past and present I have spoken to, Little’s relationship with Pell became decidedly frosty.
As the Cold War raged, the wind in the 1980s bellowing from the Vatican brought with it the return to a more orthodox conception of Catholicism. It fit with the times. Wojtyla had been, in Poland, an anti-communist champion. When elected Pope, John Paul II was a hero to the Solidarność or Solidarity—the non-violent movement in Poland which was pivotal in the demise of the Eastern Bloc. Pope John Paul II had a thousand-watt smile and a message that resonated. He was much loved by the flock. Despite the affection for the Pope in Australian parishes, both laypeople and priests were still riding the wave of a different social movement—the progressive post–Vatican II spirit of optimism, hope and openness. For the traditionalists in their midst, those were marginalising times, when they watched mass numbers dwindle and felt intellectually bored by an atmosphere of ‘holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”’.
Melbourne’s Archbishop Little was a spiritual father more of the ‘Kumbaya’ set than the Wojtyla-led neo-cons. He was, however, a man of great contradictions. He was an archbishop who ultimately accepted and, it is said, was somewhat cowed by Roman authority—much to the detriment of some parts of his ministry, most spectacularly in his gross mishandling of child abuse cases. As his Vicar-General Hilton Deakin later said, ‘one of the things that motivated the Archbishop to do what he did … was his fear of the reach of Roman Canon Law; knowing that, if a priest possibly was found guilty, he would appeal to Rome, and the Roman authorities, knowing in the most limited way what they knew about this sort of thing, would find in favour of the priest and against the Bishop’.
But Little also had his own ideas about how to do things, and in many ways they clashed with Pope John Paul II’s teaching. Little was loved by his priests, who now are at a loss to explain exactly why he, like some other bishops in other dioceses, chose to cover up the crisis that was quietly fermenting in his archdiocese. But on other pastoral matters, the priests say Little was all for openness and embracing the laity.
During his period as Auxiliary Bishop, Pell also ran Australian Catholic Relief—what is now Caritas Australia—the Catholic Church’s overseas aid organisation. And he is widely considered to have done an excellent job expanding operations and raising money through the fundraiser Project Compassion. Pell has always been considered an excellent administrator—most likely the reason why Pope Francis chose him many years later, in 2014, to reform Vatican finances. But back in the 1980s, Pell was particularly involved in work in the ruins of post–Pol Pot Cambodia, which was recovering from a brutal genocide where up to two million people were murdered or forced to leave their homes. ‘I think he made a very important contribution,’ former Archbishop of Hobart Adrian Doyle told me. Doyle took over from Pell’s successor at Caritas, Bishop Hilton Deakin. ‘It was something [George] was very interested in,’ Doyle says. ‘He was very supportive and very committed to the whole humanitarian exercise. I think once he puts his mind to something, he intends to see it through.’
Michael Costigan, whose brother Paul had been at Corpus Christi with Pell and who had also been a Catholic priest, left the priesthood and became a journalist and religious commentator. He also worked for many years for the social justice arm of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. ‘I would have to pay tribute to the job that [Pell] did,’ Costigan says. ‘He showed compassion for the poor of the world and showed concern for their plight.’ Being face to face with the human consequences of the Cambodian Killing Fields, where churches had been reduced to rubble, was clearly something that struck a deep chord in Pell, as Livingstone records him writing in 1989:
Evil is nearly as deep a mystery as saintliness, as heroic goodness, and much more of a problem. But in Cambodia nature did register a protest. Under Pol Pot, the misery and hunger were so great that the people, in their battle against famine, ate all the wild birds. More than ten years later there are very few birds in Cambodia; in many places, no birds sing.
There were those who came later to Caritas leadership who were somewhat dismayed by aspects of Pell’s approach—Pell wanting, for instance, to use the money to build churches. ‘It was meant to be a body to help people—to feed them, to help them with hospitalisation, to help them stay alive,’ one remembers. ‘Never to build churches. But that’s what he wanted to do.’
Although Costigan was, by his own admission, associated with the ‘centre left’ of the Australian Church, he says Pell was ‘supportive of me in my role’.
‘People say of him that he enjoys a bit of conflict—he enjoys the carry and thrust of rigorous debate,’ Costigan says. ‘I think I can say that in my time of working close to him, we did not have any difficult difference of opinion.
‘Sometimes we would disagree but it was always in a friendly way. I heard one of the bishops use the term “bully”, because it’s been used fairly widely about him. But if you are asking whether I would say that, well, I am a charitable journalist. There might be an element of that in his character and style, but I didn’t experience it. Except once or twice during meetings where things were not going his way, he could be forceful in putting his agenda.’
As Auxiliary Bishop, Pell wasted no time making his presence known on the Bishops Conference floor, making a splash in the media and being, well, forceful in his agenda.
Bill Morris was Bishop of the Diocese of Toowoomba and he watched the Pell ascendancy with interest. ‘George was always very political,’ says Morris, who joined the Bishops Conference in 1993. ‘He was a mover and a shaker and would keep going until he got what he wanted in an area of policy or procedure. He did not always win though.’
Morris and many others in the Church I have spoken to say Pell always only had a small group of supporters on the floor who were like-minded and they would often sit together on their own. ‘The vast majority were ambivalent to him and the rest were actively opposed or even openly hostile,’ Morris says.
‘George never won a popular vote in conference. He was never elected chair of the conference—he would have loved to be chair of the conference,’ he says. Pat Power, who was Bishop of Canberra-Goulburn until 2012, confirmed this—saying Pell’s name never got the simple majority of the secret ballot, even when in 2003 he became Cardinal. ‘The Cardinal was normally elected,’ he says. Pell’s three predecessors: Cardinal Norman Gilroy (1946), Cardinal James Freeman (1973) and Cardinal Edward Clancy (1988) were all, Power points out, elected president of the conference. It was, say others, a slap in the face for Pell not to get the nod.
Archbishop Emeritus Adrian Doyle was not close to Pell, but caught up with him at the Bishops meetings and had some admiration for his fortitude. ‘He’s a man that in the views he holds, he holds them very strongly,’ Doyle says. ‘He’s prepared to stand up and put his position as bishop in the Church.
‘He has a very powerful mind, a very strong personality. But I think there’s a gentler side to him. He can be a very compassionate and understanding person. People don’t see that very much.’
Doyle says while other bishops might have disagreed with Pell, the meetings were civil. ‘This is a group of 40-plus people—you can’t expect everyone to be the same,’ Doyle reflects. ‘I think the group got on remarkably well.’
Pell began, even as mere Auxiliary, to make himself known as One to Watch in the Church. His appointment to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was, says Hodgens, a ‘golden opportunity’. ‘He was immediately mixing with the bigwigs in [what is effectively the Vatican’s] Department of Ideology,’ Hodgens says. That included the man who would succeed Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger, who was cut from a similar theological and ideological cloth to Pell. The time of Pope John Paul and Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, is described by Hodgens as a ‘counter-reformation’ and dashed the great hopes of all those in the Church who had been buoyed by Vatican II.
Of course, Pell would argue that this was returning the Church to what it should be, to an acceptable orthodoxy which would arrest the terminal decline in numbers it was already beginning to see in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, Pell has said of Hodgens himself that he belonged to a ‘swinging sixties’ set of post–Vatican II priests whose liberalism had ‘emptied churches’ across the western world. Pell’s publicly stated view was, essentially, that morally and particularly sexually, society was going to hell in a handbasket. The laity needed to listen less to its own misguided conscience and more to, well, people like him—people who spoke the word of Truth, the word of God. To effectively disseminate his message, the young Auxiliary, just forty-five when he was appointed, embraced the bright lights of television.
How a person goes into battle tells you a lot about them. Auxiliary Bishop Pell, then as now, clearly relished the odd skirmish.
After Penny Chapman’s Brides of Christ miniseries appeared on the ABC in late 1991, Pell dismissed it as a ‘religious soapie’. It was, however, immensely popular—discussing the Church battles it explored was the water cooler discussion of the day and so, despite deeming it beneath him, Pell deigned to go on a panel on the ABC’s Couchman program to discuss the state of the Church in light of the issues thrown up by the miniseries.
ABC broadcaster and then-Catholic priest Paul Collins was also on the show. ‘I think the thing that the conservatives were most upset about was that I called him “George”,’ he says. (I have noticed in my research for this book that none of the priests I have spoken to have ever referred to Pell as anything other than ‘George’. Irking George’s perceived delusions of grandeur seems to be a bit of a blood sport in the Australian clergy.)
Collins—who more traditional Catholic commentators have written off as a leftie, complaining that he gets too much airtime on the ABC and too many Fairfax column inches (this dismissal is a common fate for anyone who comes up against Pell)—was dismayed by Pell’s demeanour on the program. He says he didn’t believe the Bishop was hearing what a number of people on the panel were saying about their negative experiences with the Church—particularly its rigidity around issues such as celibacy of priests and the ban on oral contraception. He was most angered at Pell’s reaction to the Australian actress Colette Mann, a former star of the television hit, Prisoner, who was sitting next to Pell on the program. Mann had, Collins says, given a heartfelt recount of her divorce and how desperate she had been for comfort and support from the Church.
Addressing Pell directly, Mann said, ‘I made a mistake, I married this man in 1974 and it was a big mistake.’ As she said it, Pell visibly leaned away and peered down at her. ‘I want to be forgiven for that, and I have married another man, but I am not forgiven for that, because I am not even considered to be divorced, I am considered married to the first man!’ She said both she and her ex-husband were now very happy in their new marriages. ‘And I can’t see why the Church can’t embrace me, with that happiness, but it can’t.’
Collins remembers, ‘There was sheer pain in her voice and there was pain and hurt in her whole attitude and she was speaking from her heart. If George had just reached out to her and touched her on the forearm and said something like “I am so sorry”, people would have said, “He’s a decent human being, he has to say what he says as a bishop, but he’s a nice man”. But no. He hasn’t an ounce of empathy. So, he just sat there as stiff as a board and said nothing.’
The comedian Geraldine Doyle joked darkly about the ‘industrial-strength nuns’ who had taught her when she was at school. When the camera pulled out wide, many other panellists were seen laughing heartily. But not Pell. The Bishop’s hands were crossed, his face, once a film star’s, now 50-something and well fed, was sullen as he stared at the floor.
Similarly, he had no time for the musings of former priest Don Burnard. Burnard said when he began to study Psychology while still in the priesthood and to question things, he was constantly being hauled over the coals by ‘the hierarchy and the clergy that were ambitious’. Questioning things is something that Pell, the most ambitious of them all, constantly railed against. But Burnard continued. ‘There are some wonderful men among the clergy. There are some very dead men among the clergy,’ he said. From his body language, the discussion was clearly beginning to irk Pell.
‘The real question today is that neo-paganism has failed,’ Pell declared. ‘If we followed Christian ethics, there would be no AIDS epidemic. If we had stuck closer to Christian ethics, there would not be as many marriage break-ups. Not as many suffering children. The argument against artificial contraception comes from the essential link between family, sexuality and love. And the fact that those three elements have been broken apart so radically in our society.’
This preoccupation, a constant fixture in Pell’s dialogue at the time and for many years later, is fascinating in light of the child sex allegations he now, decades later, faces.
As Pell continued, he was reinforced by Liberal Catholic politician Peter McGauran. McGauran made the women on the set apoplectic with rage by his assertion that because Christ did not appoint women as apostles, there couldn’t now be women priests. ‘Men and women are equal in the Church,’ McGauran said to gales of disbelieving laughter from the gathered nuns and other prominent Catholic women, current and lapsed, ‘but they are equal in different ways.’ It brought to mind Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which the dominant pigs haughtily announced, ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Pell had McGauran’s back. ‘We are not a social welfare agency, to be refashioned in each generation. We are part of an ongoing tradition and our basics have come from Christ,’ he said, pointing out that Christ was, after all, the son of God. ‘So Christ’s teaching is not negotiable.’
Thanks to a combination of, he believed, Pell’s preposterous arguments and what he perceived as the Bishop’s lack of empathy for Mann and others, Collins saw red. ‘And so, I thought, “the gloves are off”,’ he remembers. ‘I decided to go in, boots and all.’
Collins, who was behind Pell, said all ‘reputable scholars’ agreed it wasn’t historically correct to say that Christ had instituted the Catholic priesthood and that it was an office that really began in the third and fourth centuries. ‘To simply say that Christ set up the hierarchical Church and the ordained priesthood is nonsense!’ Collins said. Pell pursed his lips, fidgeted with the gold chain to his pectoral cross and looked to the heavens, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Collins got even more fired up. ‘You really do sound fundamentalist, and that’s what worries me about people like you in powerful positions making statements that are fundamentalist.’
At this point, the smoke practically billowed out of Pell’s ears. He reminded all present that he did his doctorate at Oxford in early Church history so he knew what he was talking about (ergo Collins—no slouch, who did his own post-graduate studies at Harvard—didn’t). ‘Because a man says what he means and means what he says, he should not be condemned as a fundamentalist, that’s a classic put-down from people who want to dissolve the basis of the faith to suggest that anyone who is hanging on to what Christ taught is a fundamentalist.’ Pell did, at this point, entertain the idea that somewhere in the future there might be married priests, although he wouldn’t be pushing for the concept. ‘[But] that’s quite different from the ordination of women,’ he said to the largely female panel, with a dismissive flick of his hand, ‘which is quite impossible.’
Collins felt a bit guilty at the end for going after Pell. ‘After the show, I thought I better go and do the good Catholic priest thing and make friends,’ Collins says. ‘I did that, but he just said, “Oh yes” and walked off.’
The Brides of Christ experience did not deter this gladiator, Pell, from entering the televisual fray once more. When in August 1993 Pope John Paul II released his papal encyclical Veritatis Splendor, the ABC’s Four Corners program chose him to go head-to-head with the more liberal Provincial of the Australian Jesuits, Father Bill Uren, on the impact of the controversial document—which reasserted papal authority and addressed some of Pell’s favourite topics at the time like birth control and assisted fertilisation. It was a fiery exchange held in October 1993 in front of a small studio audience of carefully chosen Catholic stakeholders. Uren was a lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Melbourne and, like Pell, an old boy of Campion Hall at Oxford, although he had taken Philosophy instead of Theology.
When the late journalist Andrew Olle asked Pell whether, in light of the encyclical, there was any room for dissent in the clergy now, there were gasps in the audience as the Bishop replied. ‘Well, I’m not so sure there is,’ Pell began, ‘because the purpose of the encyclical is to reassert the moral teaching of Jesus Christ who, the Pope says, is the word of Truth about good and evil.
‘The situation has certainly deteriorated since the Second Vatican Council which never at any stage suggested that a person was free to follow his own … his or her, own conscience. And what the Pope is doing is reasserting the basic moral teaching of the New Testament, which is common to all the mainline Christian Churches.’
Uren disagreed wholeheartedly—priests like him were not, as Olle described them, to become ‘moral puppets’. While Uren agreed that the Pope’s encyclical should be treated with ‘great respect’, there was still room for disagreement.
‘Is that good enough, Bishop?’ Olle asked Pell.
‘No way,’ the Bishop drily replied. Pell rejected Olle’s assessment that the Vatican was keeping priests like Uren ‘under the thumb’, though.
‘Not at all,’ Pell said. ‘What we’re doing is presenting the teaching of Jesus Christ. Whether it has a tag of a particular type, I think is quite secondary. The real point is whether Christians believe that when the Pope says he is repeating and explaining the teaching, the moral teaching of Jesus Christ, whether in fact in the bases of the encyclical, whether in fact Catholics accept that he’s doing that, and they will honestly say yea or nay, and then the Church knows where everyone stands.’
There were strident supporters of Pell’s view in the room, principally laypeople who even thought he was not going far enough and that dissenters should be weeded out and punished. But there were also fierce critics, and his response again drew guffaws from some nuns and priests in the room, including another feisty Jesuit, Father Michael Kelly, who had recently spoken out about the Auxiliary Bishop in the media and who on Four Corners that night got stuck into Pell.
‘Haven’t you in fact already been told, Father Kelly, that you have to toe the line now, you have to pull your head in?’ Olle asked Kelly, who was sitting in the audience.
‘By the same Bishop,’ Kelly, who at times has something of a terrier-like disposition, snapped back. Pell was having none of it. ‘That’s absolutely incorrect,’ he told Olle.
Kelly refused to back down. ‘George, there were only two of us there. That was what you told me. You told me to watch out.’
‘What I said was there might be a gear change. I mean, I was quite surprised … I was quite surprised to see a private conversation quoted in the press, but what I said was that I thought there might be a gear change and, given that I’m a friend of Father Michael’s, I said “be careful”,’ Pell responded.
If Kelly was ever Pell’s friend, he wasn’t showing it. ‘George, if I may … I mean, with respect, for a bishop to be telling a priest that he’d better watch out, is a pretty serious matter.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Pell replied.
‘Would you like to explain to me what you did?’
‘I just have. I just said “be careful”.’
The ‘be careful’ exchange referred to by Kelly took place after he and Pell were in a studio, this time for an ABC radio interview in October 1993, following the release of Veritatis Splendor, to debate just what the encyclical meant. Kelly was at that time the founding publisher of Eureka Street. As soon as the segment began, and before Kelly could speak, Pell launched into a monologue about ‘the genuine crisis in the Catholic Church’ which he thought was ‘the result of a greater moral confusion in the wider society’, but he also immediately got stuck into a rather taken aback Kelly. ‘I think evidence of that confusion,’ Pell began, ‘is the fact that I am here with Father Michael Kelly, the Jesuit. Now I don’t know what Father Michael is going to say, but if in fact he’s going to rubbish the encyclical, then I think that would be most inappropriate, because, Father Michael, as a priest, like me, he’s bound by the encyclical as much as I am. And also, of course, if he was going to attack the encyclical, it would be particularly unfortunate, because the Jesuits have a fourth vow of obedience to the Pope.’
Before Kelly, who did not even know that Pell would be in the studio, could say anything, Pell went on to argue that priests were essentially bound by a notion akin to Caucus or Cabinet confidentiality and should have their debates behind closed doors rather than in the public domain. ‘It’s destructive and inappropriate for you to go into the public domain with it,’ he cautioned. ‘[The Pope] is very much opposed to orchestrated and public dissent. It has done great damage to the Church.’
When the journalist Sharon O’Neill asked Kelly if he was a dissenter, he wryly observed that ‘George and I did not touch gloves as we walked into the studio, and I am certainly not here to do what George is fearing I am doing’. Kelly managed to keep his cool and to present a counterargument to Pell which did not involve the outright dissent that the Bishop had implied.
Pell launched into another spate of the old faithful: finger-wagging at the deplorable sexual mores that had seen society as he knew it fall apart.
‘We have had an epidemic of abuse of the Pill. There are more abortions, also, within the Catholic community, more broken marriages, more single mothers, more homeless and unwanted children, because of the selfish and contraceptive mentality that an unthinking use of the Pill has produced. I think we need to look closely at what has happened in our own society.’
Contraceptive mentality. At this point O’Neill pointed out that Catholics were ignoring the Church on that one. They had been for generations. Despite this, here was Pell, in 1993, when we all thought we were frightfully modern, describing the defiance of those who chose to take contraception as ‘unfortunate’ and saying ‘I think they, like all of us, need to reassess the situation’. Kelly disagreed, but declined to get into an argument with Pell and therefore confirm the Bishop’s earlier attack on him. He said that the Bishop’s comments were a misinterpretation of Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical which had reinforced the then Pope’s opposition to contraception.
But when the two priests left the studio, Kelly describes to me the full force of Hurricane George. ‘He said, “People like you better watch out,”’ Kelly tells me. ‘And I said, “Pardon, George?” And he said, glowering at me, in that voice [Kelly does a pretty solid impersonation of Pell’s booming, sonorous voice], “People like you are endangered species, there’s been a gear change in the Church and people like you are on the way out.”’
Kelly was floored and angered. It prompted him to, on the later Four Corners program, ‘put a stake in the ground’. ‘I know the vast majority of people in the Church across Australia agreed with Bill [Uren] and me and we wanted to give some recognition to that point of view,’ Kelly says. And he also wanted to put on the record what Pell had done. ‘So I did it to two and a half million of my closest friends,’ he says, chuckling sourly. ‘And it was career-altering. He was determined to do me in after that, and ultimately, he did.’
Three years later, Uren’s successor as Provincial of the Australian Jesuits, Father Daven Day, called Kelly in to tell him he had been let go from his job running Jesuit Publications. He was removed, incidentally, in April 1997—two months after Brian Scarlett’s photograph of Pell, legs akimbo in the horse trough, appeared in the magazine. Kelly suspected the hand of Pell. He was dismayed but not surprised. ‘That’s the way he’s always done things,’ Kelly says. ‘That’s his style of Catholicism.’
There appeared to be consequences, too, for Uren, for publicly crossing swords with Pell. Uren is now Rector of Newman College at the University of Melbourne, but was blocked from the job when he applied for it in the 1990s after he stepped down as the Jesuits’ Provincial. Newman College is controlled by the Melbourne Archdiocese, of which Pell was archbishop when Uren applied for the job.
The stories of Kelly and Uren bring to mind a remark Bishop Bill Morris once made to me. ‘George was always very pleasant as long as you stay away from religion,’ Morris says. That makes me laugh, given we are discussing a Catholic priest, talking about religion was pretty unavoidable. He laughs too, but then he’s also deadly serious. ‘Bring religion into it and George was a bully. How George played his football is how he plays his religion. It was always “take no prisoners”.’
Kelly says the take-no-prisoners approach was classically in the style of BA Santamaria, mentor to former Australian Prime Minister (and former seminarian) Tony Abbott as well as to Pell, although both men had their points of difference with Santamaria. ‘Santa’, as Abbott has sometimes affectionately called him, was an anti-communist, a social conservative, who set up what’s known as ‘The Movement’, which later became the National Civic Council and would split the Australian Labor Party to form the DLP. The Melbourne Press Club, which inducted Santamaria into its Hall of Fame, described him as a ‘brilliant but divisive polemicist’. Thanks, for many years, to the benevolence of Frank Packer and his son Kerry, he was a strident and eloquent broadcaster, whose monologue Point of View would appear on Channel Nine on a Sunday morning. As Australians prepared their roast lunch and waited for the wrestling on Wide World of Sports to come on the box, they’d be treated to a soliloquy where Santamaria would deliver without autocue, barely stopping for breath, his sermon on the issue of the day as he perceived it. One memorable tirade in 1985 concerned the hotbed of ‘radical feminism and homosexuality’—the ABC—whose presenters were ‘with few exceptions … protagonists of aberrant sexual practices’.
Santamaria was very close to Rome through its papal nuncio to Australia—effectively, its man on the ground—Franco Brambilla. When Santamaria was on his deathbed in 1998, he was visited by both Brambilla and Pell. When Prime Minister John Howard granted Santamaria a state funeral, it was Pell who gave the eulogy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne. ‘You have to see George in the context of the culture wars,’ Kelly says. ‘George is a defined culture warrior and it’s a position mapped out for him by Bob Santamaria. He has done what Santamaria did and it’s black and white, good and evil, right and wrong—you know, “our guys are right and all the others are dissidents”—it’s the politicisation of religion. Santamaria was the greatest practitioner of the demonisation of anyone who disagreed with him. Anyone who disagreed could only be evil.’
These days, people get their giggles out of watching retro Santamaria clips on YouTube as old Santa thunders on about the scourge of ‘gays’ and other contributors to the downfall of civilisation as we knew it. So as befits the times in which he has found himself, it is arguable that Pell’s polemical approach is somewhat more nuanced than Santamaria’s. Somewhat. But back in the eighties, Auxiliary Bishop Pell was far less subtle. He vigorously defended his Church against criticism and dissent, going at the doubters like a mallee bull. With a front, as they said in those days, ‘the size of Myer’. But there is evidence to suggest that there was a deeply serious flaw in that overarching confidence. And that it was sometimes exercised at the expense of exposing the child abuse epidemic that was exploding around him.