A TWEETER BEFORE TWITTER
And the angel said to them, ‘Be not afraid’.
Luke 2:10
The announcement in July 1996 that Pell had become Archbishop of Melbourne was a huge surprise to the priests of the city. It was no secret that many of them did not care for his style. It was equally apparent that Pell himself was unburdened by this and felt that he should get on with reforming an archdiocese which he considered to be foundering under Frank Little.
Terry Laidler, who had by then long left the priesthood, was doing the evening shift on Melbourne’s ABC local radio talkback station, then known as 3LO. After the fax carrying the announcement of Pell’s appointment had rolled off the machine, he remembers staring at the press release, wondering if he was reading it right. No-one saw it coming. He called his friend, the parish priest at Belgrave, Phil O’Donnell. O’Donnell remembers, ‘Terry says, “Frank’s resigned, George is Archbishop of Melbourne!” And I said, “Piss off Laidler, I’ve got a meeting to go to.” And he said, “No, Phil, I’m serious” and he and I could not believe it.’
Laidler faxed the press release through to O’Donnell and, O’Donnell says, ‘I just sat there, stunned and then I went out and said to the finance guys, “We’ve got a new Archbishop”.’
For the next days, the phones rang hot on the priestly grapevine. ‘People were just shocked,’ O’Donnell says. The thing that really shocked them was that Little was just seventy—five years younger than the usual age in which an archbishop submits his retirement. Like most septuagenarians, he had a few health complaints, but nothing so serious as to be a significant impediment to his ministry. There had been no warning signs that it was coming. And his successor stood proudly for a form of clerical Catholicism which Little did not at all support. ‘Others do the choosing,’ Little famously said.
‘To use a contemporary parallel, for us, it was kind of like Trump following Obama,’ O’Donnell muses. One of the curiosities of those years for outsiders looking in is that Little was considered a gentle, decent and inclusive operator by the priests and parishioners of his archdiocese at the time, however unkind history has rightly been to his appalling handling of the sexual abuse crisis. ‘And then you get the Big Man come in,’ O’Donnell remembers. ‘And I thought, “Wow, it’s not going to be dull”.’
Dull it most certainly was not. O’Donnell says most of the priests he knew in the archdiocese were not happy about Pell’s appointment, although at the time O’Donnell said he had a very cordial relationship with the Archbishop and they always got on ‘very, very well’ in person. He remembers Pell coming to stay at his parish for three days in the early years of Pell’s tenure in the top job. ‘I was a bit apprehensive because we were at different ends of the spectrum of the Church, so having George as a house guest—I didn’t know how it would be,’ O’Donnell says. ‘But I do have to say it was an absolute pleasure having him and he was very good company—very convivial and very respectful. I think he and I have had plenty of points of debate and discussion around various issues, but it was a very positive experience. I have got some very serious criticisms of George, but not on a personal level. On a personal level, I found him to be very good.’
So, what happened? How did Pell become archbishop out of the blue? The word among Melbourne priests of the time was that Little had in the January of that year visited Rome, asking the Vatican to appoint a coadjutor, or, essentially, anointed successor, so that when the time was right for him, he could move on with a smooth succession plan in place. That is what had always happened. But when Little went to Rome, he was told that that was not to happen. He came back, tail between his legs and six months later, the Pope appointed Pell, a man with whom he had little common ground and with whom his relationship was civil at best; as Pell himself said much later, ‘we were not close friends in any sense’.
‘Frank never had any time for Pell but got saddled with him [as Auxiliary],’ says Eric Hodgens, who was a senior priest in the archdiocese at the time. Hodgens points out that it’s significant that Pell was at that time a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—allowing him to become a player in the Vatican. ‘This job involved regular participation in Roman meetings and wheeling and dealing in Vatican politics,’ Hodgens writes for the Catholic website Catholica. ‘George became a recognised figure in Vatican corridors.’
When, years later, Pell was asked about Little’s retirement in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, he was highly critical of Little and indicated that his covering up of child abuse, including keeping secret files on paedophile priest allegations, had something to do with Little’s early retirement—four years early.
He said that ‘it would not surprise me if Archbishop Little was requested to put in his resignation’. Pell declined to say who might have made this request, but agreed that the Apostolic Nuncio Brambilla would have had the power to do this and it ‘would have been done in consultation with [Little]’.
‘It wasn’t worked out in consultation with you?’ the Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission, Gail Furness, asked him tartly.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Pell replied.
The priests he was to lead at the time were sceptical of whether the child abuse mismanagement by Little was the real reason, believing instead that Pell was simply the Pope’s Man in Melbourne. One way or the other, it was recognised that the child abuse issue desperately needed to be addressed.
Little had secret files and allowed accused priests to stay in their posts, like the infamous and dangerous Peter Searson at Doveton. Pell’s publicly stated spin on this is that liberal, lax morality allowed this to happen and the only cure for it was a return to rigidity. In his words, ‘a colossal failure of leadership’.
Whether you believe that interpretation, the clergy, even those who had no knowledge of what was going on, had been in complete denial about child abuse as an issue. Even some urbane, intelligent priests I have spoken to say that until the late 1980s, they are mortified to admit they had absolutely no understanding of child abuse—they thought it was simply a ‘moral failing’ of which a person could be ‘cured’—not an incurable criminal addiction and something that would cause lifelong trauma in its victims. Some revealed that at that time they conflated abusing pubescent boys with homosexuality. They also say that this was a wider societal phenomenon and, certainly, it was common for familial abuse at the time not to be reported to police. My constant refrain to this is that these were crimes on the statute books. They say they know that, but are ashamed to admit they didn’t have a real understanding of it then. Some were quite desperately naïve about matters sexual. And homosexuality was a crime on the statute books too.
These are decent men and they are speaking from the heart. But it can’t help but stick in one’s craw that at the time they were living under this gross misapprehension, their own Church, and the celibate men schooled in remote seminaries like the Corpus Christi of the fifties and sixties, was so incredibly prescriptive about how adults should live their lives—no contraception, no abortion, no sex outside marriage, no homosexual relationships. Also, not all of them were labouring under this dangerous falsehood. Father Noel Brady was advocating for survivors and knew what was happening was wrong. Phil O’Donnell was travelling the length and breadth of the state to hear from victims and to help them negotiate their complaints to the Church or the criminal justice system. Why did it occur to them and not others? When I ask these questions, the priests are embarrassed, but often a bit stumped, as to the answer. Some of the older ones go silent or change the subject or fluff the answer or plead their age. Right and wrong, as I have found out, are often sticky notions.
I remember an incident from my own childhood when I was about six years old that causes me to reflect on this collective ignorance. I was living in Scotland and attending a Catholic primary school in a small and unsophisticated regional town. It was at some point during, I think, 1979 or 1980. I was at the bottom of the playground with two friends and a man approached us from the other side of the fence and wanted to lift us over. He told us he had a little boy at home who was having a great time and had lots of sweets. We could get sweets too if we came with him. We told him we would not go and we did not like him, but we were kind of hypnotised with repulsion–attraction. We couldn’t take our eyes away. We didn’t notice the bell ring, the other children file inside. Eventually, the teachers realised we were missing and set out to find us. The man ran off and we were whisked away. The police were called and we were all given a lengthy lecture on stranger danger. The only telling, classically 1970s, aspect of this is that they neglected to tell my parents.
The point is, if a Catholic school in a forgettable little town in Scotland knew that potential child abuse was enough of a problem to call the police, surely the clerics of a large metropolitan archdiocese in Australia did too? It’s hard to escape the feeling that the difference here is that the offenders were their own, that it was hard for them to think that a man of God, the fellow charged with, like them, telling the rest of us what to do, could suffer from the same human frailty as a creepy stranger.
Not long after Pell settled into the top job, he set about radically changing the way the archdiocese worked. He employed a slick corporate public relations firm, Royce Communications. Royce, under the careful stewardship of Peter Mahon, has been there with Pell ever since. Whether it or Pell comes up with the headlines is hard to say, but the Archbishop went with punchy, newsworthy messaging, big time.
‘Think the religious equivalent of “jobs and growth” or “stop the boats”—Pell was gifted at simple messaging,’ Hodgens says. Policy and theology translated into simple and digestible grabs. David Marr lists some of them in his Quarterly Essay, The Prince, written about Pell in 2013: ‘Mail Order Divorce’ and ‘the spread of gay propaganda’, and others include: ‘our contraception culture’ and ‘the bland leading the bland’.
‘Oh, George was a tweeter before Twitter,’ Hodgens says. ‘And he was doing that when the whole of the established authority of the Church in Rome was on his side—that explains his whole rise.’
The clever messaging extended to every part of the operation. For example, as Livingstone reports in the Pell biography, for his archbishop’s coat of arms, ‘Pell dispensed with the traditional Latin, choosing instead Be Not Afraid, echoing Christ’s words to his followers in the Gospel’. But it was also in keeping with Pell’s pugilistic style of Catholicism—the son of a boxer who owned a pub who had that very take-no-prisoners approach to theology and to ministry. It was perfect. Pell seemed like a guy who wasn’t afraid of anything.
And he wasn’t all talk—one of his first moves as archbishop that year was to clear out the entire staff at Corpus Christi seminary. Pell wanted to revamp the place, with a greater focus on prayerfulness, a return to a more monastic daily order, and a tightening of what he saw as liberal attitudes. The official version of events was that they resigned, but the bottom line is, every single member of staff resigned in a day—they believe they had no choice and so really, they were sacked. The decision rocked the archdiocese. It made international news.
The rector of the seminary was Father Paul Connell. Connell is an exceptionally bright, Oxford-educated theologian who still teaches at the Catholic Theological College in Melbourne. I met him at his presbytery at St Oliver Plunkett’s in Pascoe Vale in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, where Connell is parish priest. Connell has wrestled with his conscience and decided to set the record straight about what Pell did to him and his colleagues. ‘It’s been just over twenty years,’ Connell told me. ‘I think it’s time.’ In 1996, he sat down and made forensic contemporaneous notes about what took place with Pell. He put them away for safekeeping and only showed them to his closest confidants. In February 2017, he decided that the time was right to put them in the public domain and handed them to me across the little coffee table in his parlour.
Connell’s account says he first learned of his and his colleagues’ fate on Saturday 9 November 1996, when he met Pell at Mentone, where Pell had been living as Auxiliary Bishop, to discuss another matter. They had a brief discussion, and then Pell handed Connell a document. ‘Now to more contentious matters,’ the Archbishop declared. The document proposed that the seminary be moved from the Clayton site and proposed a radical overhaul. While the Archbishop indicated that there had been some discussion about whether the changes be delayed, he had ‘decided a few weeks ago to cross the Rubicon and do it now’. ‘I suppose it would be difficult for you [the present seminary staff] to implement this,’ Connell says the Archbishop told him. Connell could only agree that the Archbishop was right.
Connell was snookered and he knew it. Under Connell, the seminary had a central focus on the key goal of human formation, in line with Pope John Paul II’s 1992 exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis— what Connell describes as a ‘magnificent document’—‘effectively the Magna Carta for seminary formation’. The document argues, Connell says, that despite the decline in priestly vocations that was happening at the time, it was still primarily important that seminaries were forming priests as mature human beings.
These principles had guided the original design of Clayton, and Connell felt that they would be put at risk under this new system. Pell had already put some thought into where each of them might go—one priest could have a ‘good parish’, another could continue his academic work at a university, and Connell would be treated with ‘dignity’ and allowed to continue lecturing Theology.
Connell went back to see his staff. ‘Well, we’ve been sacked!’ he told them. The following Tuesday, the trustees of the seminary met—that is, all of the bishops of Victoria and Tasmania. When Connell arrived at 4 p.m., he sensed the bishops had had a ‘testing’ day. The other bishops wanted to protect the reputation of the seminary staff and so a compromise deal was sought with Pell whereby the present staff could stay on for a year, but only if they did so under the new Pell model. ‘Apparently, George had begun by holding a gun at their collective heads. If they rejected his proposals, they were welcome to continue to conduct Corpus Christi, but he would withdraw and start his own seminary for Melbourne. Since he controlled about two thirds of the proprietorship and financial resources of the seminary, and each other [bishop] just a fraction, this amounted to fairly crude blackmail,’ Connell wrote. The other bishops were, Connell said, being challenged to put at risk the unity of the region. He said they were in an ‘intolerably difficult position’.
‘Such pushing through of his own agenda with unseemly haste is again a typical tactic of George,’ Connell wrote. ‘Little time is allowed for any effective opposition to develop, and his thick-skinned blustering style invariably wins the day.’
Connell went back to his staff with a heavy heart. They did not want to work under ‘an excessively forceful and interfering chairman’ like Pell. They did not want to be used for a year, then simply cast aside. And resignation was a ‘particularly galling prospect’, because they felt they were doing good work.
So, the staff resolved to refuse to resign and to force Pell to sack them—then ‘George would have to bear the public consequences of carrying out his own original decisions in this whole affair’. But when Connell told Pell of this decision the following day, Pell replied that that was most certainly not to happen. ‘You have to resign,’ Connell says the Archbishop blustered. ‘The motion’s designed for that.’ Snookered again, Connell acquiesced. Connell announced at a meeting of staff and students that the entire staff had decided ‘that we have no option but to resign’. At dinner that night, Connell says Pell described the meeting as ‘one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do’.
Of course, it was far more difficult for the staff. But Connell was determined not to let that show or to stoop to a tabloid-style public spat with the Archbishop. The Archbishop was convinced that this was going to drive enrolment numbers up. While seminary numbers had, admittedly, dropped enormously since the 1970s, Connell was committed to the screening processes he and his staff had implemented to make sure that the right people were entering, people who were temperamentally suited to becoming priests. ‘George’s views were more akin to the older practices of accepting almost anyone and “letting the seminary sort them out”.’ The dreadful legacy of the seminary of the fifties and sixties—that is, the scourge of paedophilia—shows just how important screening was. And it shows that the seminary most certainly did not sort them out. Pretty much every priest I have spoken to for this book—whatever their theological or philosophical persuasion—believes that it’s more likely that this vocation was seen as a ‘safe haven’ for someone with paedophiliac tendencies, rather than the seminary being a place that created paedophiles. If that’s true, then good testing and vetting procedures for the seminary are and were vital.
Dr Michael Leahy, who is friends with some of those who lost their jobs, says there is no other way of putting it than they were ‘summarily dismissed’. Despite his warm relationship with Pell in their seminary and Propaganda Fide days, Leahy thinks this type of exercise of power by Pell and other ‘ruthlessly destructive’ examples he has been told of over the years by priest friends, ‘can be characterised in no other terms than those of a bully’.
‘You might be tempted to think that the exercise of authority in this way is not altogether surprising in a notoriously authoritarian institution,’ Leahy says. ‘In fact, it is even more scandalous than it would be in a secular institution. The Church is in its very essence supposed to be a community of love. The tyrannical exercise of authority thus always violates this essence and thus harms the faith of those who see it and suffer it.’
Be that as it may, the seminary numbers began to climb again in the years following and, as of 2015, The Age reported, the intake was back to fifty-nine seminarians—the largest number since the 1970s. Some Catholic commentators believe the positive influence of Pell has been lasting. But the Age article makes the point that one of the real ‘pull’ factors now is the charismatic Pope Francis and his infectious message of love and kindness. As Connell pointed out, since Pell’s changes, the rigorous screening processes that he and his colleagues had employed were gone.
Father Peter Matheson, who is now parish priest at Cheltenham in Melbourne’s sand belt, believes Pope Francis, not Pell, is definitely the dominant factor in those that are coming forward with vocations now. But he says the idea that the seminaries are filling again to any significant degree is overstated. He says there is a ‘desperate’ shortage of priests and those who are left work extremely hard. He says that the Pell–Hart legacy has left a different complexion in the clergy in Melbourne too. ‘A lot of the young priests that are coming through are very, very conservative,’ Matheson says. ‘We are basically Vatican II priests and I think they are waiting for us to die off. The young guys are what we call “sacristy priests”—they are more interested in things like canon law than they are in the people or putting people first before the law. They like wearing their soutanes and their collars—it’s a very clerical model, different to our model, which was about working with people.’ He says that the model reflected in the younger priests was popularised and encouraged in the era of Pell in the 1990s and 2000s.
Matheson was in 1996 chairman of the Diocesan Liturgical Commission, which worked with the parishes on issues like how the mass would be told—for example, how much parishioners were involved, which music would be chosen—and it also ran a diocesan magazine. He says he was immediately removed when Pell came in, to be replaced by Pell’s friend and later successor, Denis Hart. ‘The basic reason was that we were discussing what we were going to do when there were not enough priests to celebrate masses—how the liturgy would be celebrated and how we might assist the laypeople of a parish to conduct a lay-led mass,’ Matheson remembers. This was not so much a desire of the commission, but rather a recognition, he says, that it was a realistic possibility given the rapid decline of vocations. ‘We thought that would have to happen in the future,’ Matheson says. ‘But George said that [a lay-led mass] was not happening in any archdiocese of his. Our vision of the future was not his.’ Matheson was philosophical about his demise in the role—but said it was yet another of the decisions that symbolised the shift under Pell and created a Church in Melbourne that was radically different to what had come before.