BIG GEORGE
Your appointment was the biggest thing that has happened to Sydney since Plugger Lockett came to town.
Michael Costigan to George Pell
If Pell’s handling of the Melbourne Response upset his fellow bishops, it had absolutely zero impact on his standing in Rome. The Archbishop of Melbourne continued, with the Pope’s blessing, his ideological crusade. A key example of that mission was his handling of the ‘Rainbow Sash’ movement—a group of gay Catholics who wanted more acceptance from their Church. That acceptance was not forthcoming from Pell and matters came to a head on Pentecost Sunday, 31 May 1998. A group of Rainbow Sash protesters turned up to St Patrick’s Cathedral, where a confirmation mass was taking place. They said their sexuality should not preclude them from participating actively in the mass. Pell refused them holy communion and upbraided them for disturbing the service. The congregation treated the Archbishop to a hearty round of applause. The protesters were crestfallen, and, as Bishop Pat Power remembers, felt ‘further alienated’.
Rainbow Sash turned up to Power’s own church in Canberra the Sunday after they had been to St Patrick’s and Power regretfully informed them during his homily that Church teaching forbade him, too, from granting them the blessed sacrament of communion, which he said was one of the hardest things he had ever done in his thirty-three years as a priest. ‘We need to find new and better ways for the Church to enunciate its teaching on sexual morality,’ Power told the gathered congregation. ‘I recognise the pain of you homosexual people here today, as I recognise the pain of too many other groups of Catholics: of Catholics in irregular marriages, of some of my dear friends who have left the active ministry.’
But the powers that were in the Vatican lay with Pell, not Power. Nothing encapsulates this more than an episode in the late nineties known ominously as The Statement of Conclusions, released at the Oceanic Synod (a meeting of bishops from the Oceania region) in 1998 and signed by the presidents of eight of the Roman congregations. The statement was a document which essentially outlined the Vatican’s thoughts on the parlous state of the Australian Church. ‘It was dreadful,’ Power says. The criticisms contained in it echoed the sentiments often expressed by Pell, although the other bishops have never been able to prove that Pell had a hand in it.
Pell, like the other archbishops of the day and secretaries and chairs of bishops committees, was involved in dialogue before the Oceanic Synod and Power says they told him it was a good meeting and they felt positive about the future. Then, at the Oceanic Synod, Power, like all the other Australian bishops, had the opportunity to make a statement in front of the Pope and their ecclesiastical contemporaries and, Power says, ‘we all felt very liberated’. Some of the issues the Australian bishops brought up related to married priests, homosexuality and an expanded role for women in the Church. As Sister of Mercy and social justice advocate Sister Margaret Hinchey told Four Corners the following year, ‘I was thrilled with that—thought, “This is wonderful, that the bishops are saying a lot of the things a lot of us are saying, they obviously are concerned”.’
Power also felt hopeful. ‘I remember someone making the comment one time that George has not had much to say, and someone else said, “George knows the real action is elsewhere”,’ Power tells me. ‘Now, I don’t really know what that meant and I have no evidence that George was responsible for this, but George would have been very well-connected among those people in the Vatican.’
The bishops’ hopes were dashed. The Statement of Conclusions from Pope John Paul II basically rejected everything they were saying and criticised the egalitarian nature of the Australian Church which, the Pope supposed, could undermine the authority of the clergy. The bishops felt that the egalitarian nature of the Australian Church was its very strong point. Archbishop John Bathersby of Brisbane admitted to ‘terrible disappointment’ when he saw it and felt ‘sad’ and ‘somewhat depressed’. ‘But ultimately … I prayed. I prayed about the document and because I did carry hurt and pain, and then said, “No, well this is coming from the leader of the Church. I have to take it seriously.”’ When, on the ABC’s Four Corners, journalist Andrew Fowler asked Pell after The Statement of Conclusions was released what Pell thought was the biggest threat to the Catholic Church at that time, Pell replied, ‘Oh, that we’ll just merge into the background’. Merging into the background was, of course, the last thing Pell wanted for himself or his Church. ‘[I fear] that we’ll just take on the colours of our society,’ and added his memorable slogan, ‘that we’ll become the bland leading the bland.’
It was around about that time that a lay group based in Sydney and led by the conservative lawyer Paul Brazier started sending out spies to parishes around the country to see if priests were conducting group confessions through the Third Rite of Reconciliation. The Third Rite allowed Catholic mass-goers to have their sins absolved en masse rather than be required to visit the confessional alone with a priest. In what will be a mystery to non-Catholic readers, it was a great source of debate for Catholics in the 1980s and 1990s. It had been favoured by Pell’s predecessor, Frank Little, but was not supported by Pope John Paul II. The conservative spies duly reported back the results of their spying on the Third Rite to Rome. Archbishop Len Faulkner of Adelaide, who is now ninety and retired, confirmed to me that this was happening in his archdiocese, where he had opposed the spying, and also raised concerns about the theologically conservative Catholic groups Opus Dei and the Neo-Catechumenates taking a foothold in South Australia. Faulkner is tired and not wanting to buy into the old debates any more, but he confirmed that such spying was against the spirit of the archdiocese he was trying to lead: one of openness and dialogue.
The Statement of Conclusions and its aftermath essentially confirmed that as far as Rome was concerned, the theological position championed by Pell, which railed against the primacy of conscience, had won. Pell was winning at home too. On 26 March 2001, he was appointed to the most important archdiocese in the country. Pell was made the eighth Metropolitan Archbishop of Sydney.
‘I remember he would much later repeat back to me what I had said [at the time],’ Michael Costigan remembers. ‘Which was that “your appointment was the biggest thing that has happened to Sydney since Plugger Lockett came to town”.’
‘Plugger’ was, of course, Tony Lockett, the dazzlingly talented AFL player who had played full-forward for St Kilda but had defected to Sydney in the nineties. ‘[Pell] thought that was pretty funny that I said that—he enjoyed it,’ Costigan says.
‘But the Plugger thing was kind of symbolic as well. Plugger was big, he was tough, the opposition would be making a mistake if they got in his way. He was a big player and he was a very good one. No-one in the game has kicked as many goals as he did. He was a very strong player and he did not take prisoners. You made a mistake if you stood in his way when he was charging through. And of course, that was like George.’
By the following year, 2002, Pell had become a true Catholic celebrity. He had friends and allies in high political office like Tony Abbott and Prime Minister John Howard. And despite the stern authoritarian pronouncements on how his flock should live their lives, he was nonetheless something of a social butterfly. He dined with an elite circle of Sydney Catholics and wowed his dinner companions with his charming banter.
One of those people was a good friend of mine from The Australian, where I then worked: Jane Fraser. She had a weekly column, ‘Plainly Jane’, a wicked sense of humour and a fabulous harbourside mansion where she would serve champagne to guests on the terrace. Jane, a member of the Catholic Weekly Board and a regular at St Mary’s Cathedral, loved Pell. When Jane died, Pell said she was ‘a dear friend, great company and good to be with’. She would often speak of him—she’d sometimes discuss dinners where matters of the day would be mulled over with Pell and other prominent Catholics. Jane said Pell was jolly good fun, incredibly bright and maintained ‘the knockers’ just didn’t get him.
But in the middle of that year, the Carnival of George came to a sudden and grinding halt. In June, the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program featured a story about abuse victim David Ridsdale, who claimed that Pell had tried to stop him from going public about his long-running abuse by his uncle, serial paedophile Gerald Ridsdale. The Ridsdale allegation turned into something of a saga, which went on for more than a decade.
On 7 August, an article appeared in a much less august publication that would nonetheless cause far more of a headache for the Archbishop than the slickly produced 60 Minutes effort. The story landed in a little-known leftist website called Indymedia.The author professed to be one ‘Xavier O’Byrne’ of ‘Parramatta’. He said Pell was being accused of child sexual abuse. At first blush, it had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory, a hateful slur. And had it not been for the white noise created by the 60 Minutes piece, it may not have attracted the attention it ultimately did. Pell only heard of it when informed by his solicitor the following day. Leder promptly fired off legal letters to the website’s editors.
But the mainstream media got on board. Newspapers including The Age were chasing the story and demanded an official response. The narrative got away from the Church. On 20 August, two weeks after the obscure website first broke the story, media outlets across Sydney were informed that at 5.30 p.m., just before the commercial television deadline, the Archbishop would make an announcement. That announcement was to be that Pell would step aside as archbishop while the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference held an arm’s length inquiry into the allegation. This wasn’t merely a scurrilous, made-up story by a marginal online publication. It was a genuine complaint. As to whether the substance of the complaint was also genuine, the retired Supreme Court justice who was appointed to oversee the inquiry would determine that. His name was Alec J Southwell, QC.
The Archbishop felt wrong-footed and wounded by the whole fiasco and made it known. He believed that others in the Church had deliberately kept him in the dark, because they had known about the complaint for a good two months and hadn’t told him. The complainant had, at the advice of his parish priest, gone to Towards Healing, and met, through that process, with Sister Angela Ryan of the Church’s National Committee for Professional Standards (NCPS) on 11 June. Pell’s Auxiliary Bishop in Sydney, Geoffrey Robinson, who was also on the committee, had also been aware as he had had several telephone calls with the complainant, but to the Archbishop’s chagrin, neither the Bishop nor Ryan had kept Pell in the loop.
Pell came out swinging in a Sydney Morning Herald interview, titled ‘Pell the Victim of Cruel Treatment’, by columnist Miranda Devine. Devine is a conservative Catholic, one of Jane Fraser’s gregarious dining set, and has always been a loyal defender of Pell. Pell complained to Devine that he had suffered an ‘appalling lack of due process’. ‘If there are procedures in the Towards Healing process, we should follow them,’ Pell told the columnist. ‘The [accused] person should be informed as soon as possible.’ He also later told a press conference he thought the timing was ‘remarkable’. And when a reporter asked the Archbishop whether not being informed earlier ‘damaged’ his case in any way, the Archbishop declared ‘it certainly didn’t help it’.
However, the NCPS had found itself in a terrible bind. The advice to Towards Healing from the state police forces with which it liaised was absolutely unambiguous: it should not, under any circumstances, inform the alleged offender of the fact that a complaint had been made about him or her. That, the Church officials were told, was a job for police. But in this case, the victim did not want to press charges—despite several phone calls with Robinson in which the Bishop begged the complainant to go to the police, the complainant declined. Robinson’s view was that it was absolute folly for the Church to investigate a complaint of this nature—it was much too high profile and fraught. The Church could only find itself accused of a whitewash or a cover-up. A police investigation was the proper approach.
The problem with a police investigation was that the complainant, it transpired, had good reason to feel that he might not get a fair hearing. The complainant was not for turning. As these negotiations were taking place, the Indymedia piece appeared online. The wagons began to circle. The NCPS assumed at the time that the complainant had leaked it—but he says he did not. One way or the other, the NCPS had to act. And the Archbishop found out in the worst possible way: public humiliation.
The complainant was to discover that Pell does not respond well to public humiliation. As one of Pell’s former priestly colleagues in the Church told me, ‘George is like a bulldozer. His way of defending is to attack’. And attack he did.
Pell’s complainant, Phil Scott, met the young man he says abused him in 1961 when Scott was a 12-year-old altar boy from the working-class parish of Christ the King in Braybrook in Melbourne’s west. Pell was a 20-year-old Corpus Christi trainee priest. Scott’s devoutly Catholic mother struggled to make ends meet and was delighted when her young charge was invited to an altar boys’ camp on Phillip Island, supervised by a priest and a handful of seminarians. Several of the seminarians told me that Pell was accompanied on the camp by his good friend Tony Bongiorno, who was later outed as a paedophile priest. One former seminarian even later pondered if perhaps the complainant had mistaken George for Tony. But George and Tony looked nothing alike.
The camp was at Smiths Beach, a pretty rocky inlet looking out onto Bass Strait. While the little kids slept in a dormitory with one or two seminarians, the bigger ones like Scott and the remainder of the trainee priests slept in military-style tents. It promised to be a boy’s own adventure.
It was in one of the tents that Scott alleges the seminarian, whom the boys referred to as ‘Big George’, first got at him. He says that during activities like pillow-fighting or wrestling, Big George, while facing him, put his hands down the inside of young Phil’s pants and got a ‘good handful’ of his penis and testicles. It happened, he says, on several occasions. Scott was shocked at this behaviour: first, because before that he had regarded the trainee priest as ‘a fun person, a gentle person, a kind person, he was a terrific bloke’, and second, because while Big George was doing this to him, he says other boys were also in the tent, horsing around and seemingly oblivious. Scott maintains he believed Pell positioned himself in such a way that the others would not have seen. The 12-year-old boy did not know what to do, the 53-year-old Scott later explained, remembering back, except pull the man’s hand away each time.
But Scott says it didn’t stop at that. On a further two occasions, he alleged, the seminarian took Scott’s hand and guided it down his own pants. Scott says he whipped his hand out before it could touch Pell’s genitals. There was another time, when the boys were all on an evening stroll, walking ‘Indian file’, and Scott remembers Pell grabbing him from behind and putting his big hands down Scott’s pants. And then there was the time when they were swimming. As Scott jumped through the waves fizzing onto the beach, he says Pell put his hand down inside Scott’s bathers and touched him again. For reasons that will become clear later, as I re-read this particular detail fourteen years after Scott went public, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up on end.
Catholic Church officials who were used to dealing with the classically predatory grooming behaviour of other paedophile priests—a tired and sorry script repeated over and over—later saw the detail of the complaint and found it distinctly odd. Scott did not describe a lead-up. The priest hadn’t cosied up to him, hadn’t heaped him with flattery, hadn’t showered him with presents, talked about ‘our little secret’, made him feel like he was the ‘only one’. In short, there was no real grooming. Scott’s allegation was, one Church official mused, ‘just straight-out grabbing’. ‘It was pretty unique,’ says the official, who concedes they genuinely don’t know what happened on that camp, but felt at the time that Scott was believable. ‘But if there was ever anyone who would offend in this way, I can imagine that George might.’
‘Why’s that?’ I ask the official, bemused.
‘Because that’s the kind of person he is. He’s not a very subtle person,’ the official replies. To be clear, this person is not saying Pell is an offender, but rather, if it was proven that Pell was, it wouldn’t be a shock to learn that this was the way Pell chose to offend.
Scott says the only person he told at the time about Big George was his friend, who was known simply in the Southwell Inquiry as ‘A’, whose real name was Michael Foley. Scott claims to have also seen Big George molest Foley in the same way. He said Foley turned away from Big George and told him to ‘fuck off’. Scott says the boys discussed the abuse on the camp and one day, it all just got too much for his friend. Foley ran away and when Scott says he found him, Foley had a box of matches and was threatening that he was ‘going to burn the place down’. He says they then lit a fire. It became a grass fire, he remembers, and was brought under control by the Country Fire Authority. Sure enough, it was later proven in the Southwell Inquiry that the CFA had indeed extinguished a grass fire near Smiths Beach on 13 January 1961.
The first time Scott told anyone outside his family about Big George was when he called the Broken Rites victims’ support group. He spoke to former historian Bernard Barrett. That was in May 2000, say Scott and Barrett, who gave evidence in the inquiry. Barrett says Scott told him that, watching television, he had recently recognised the Archbishop of Melbourne to be the seminarian who had molested him almost forty years before. The Archbishop of Melbourne, said Scott, was ‘Big George’.