SOUTHWELL
It was a stark reminder of how differently our press treats vulnerable accusers and powerful men who stand accused.
Ronan Farrow, discussing allegations levelled by his sister against their father, Woody Allen
I went to see Father Bob McGuire many years later to discuss what happened to Phil Scott when he came up against George Pell. By that time, McGuire had long been ‘managed out’ of the Catholic Church by Pell’s successor and old ally Denis Hart. I went to McGuire’s office in South Melbourne. McGuire doesn’t have a parish any more—they took that away from him. Instead he inhabits this ramshackle shopfront, where he runs his charity. I sat and waited for him on a nineties plaid armchair covered in dog hair from McGuire’s poodle. Eventually, the priest called me in. ‘Oh no,’ he said in his slightly comical drawl, rolling his eyes, when I told him who I was. ‘I’ve told you, I can’t bloody help you.’
When I insisted I’d like to have a chat anyway, he ushered me into his office. For someone who didn’t want to help me, McGuire could chat the hind legs off a donkey. His conversation goes in complicated loops. And every now and then, say, three-quarters through the loop, he says something absolutely compelling and quoteworthy, but you can’t prick up your ears, can’t change the expression on your face, because then he’s onto you. He’s onto the fact that maybe that is something you might want to use and he’ll recalcitrantly change the subject.
Maguire won’t soon forget Phil Scott coming to him with his problem in 2002. The priest listened to his parishioner, whom he’d known for a number of years through Scott’s work with street kids, in silence. ‘He didn’t want to go to police,’ Maguire said. ‘He was a former Painter and Docker,’ he said, speaking of the union to which Scott belonged, which in the 1980s was caught up in enormous controversy in the Costigan Royal Commission. ‘Phil didn’t want compensation. All he wanted was for George Pell to be in the room with him, man to man, and look him in the eye and apologise for what he did. And of course, that’s not what happened. But it’s not for me to discuss this with you. Read my book. Read my book.’
His book is a biography by journalist Sue Williams. In it, she says Maguire admired Scott for ‘having risen above a past riven by alcoholism and crime’. In 2002, it says, the 53-year-old Scott was ‘a respected figure whom [Bob] bumped into regularly at Collingwood football games and seemed genuine in his belief about what had happened. He said he wasn’t after publicity or money—he’d been tortured by the memory of what he recalled having happened and wanted the Church quietly to acknowledge that, and perhaps have a meeting with George Pell, to lay his demons to rest’.
Scott’s situation left Maguire, his biography says, with a ‘terrible dilemma’. ‘On the one hand, he found this accusation very hard to believe,’ it says, referring to Maguire’s prima facie assumption that his fellow priests, especially one that had risen to such dizzy heights as Pell, were of sound and good character. ‘On the other, he’d worked with abused kids long enough to know that those in authority often didn’t take their claims seriously and, in the case where they were telling the truth, scepticism and a refusal to investigate could cause them sometimes even more damage.’
But despite the nervousness of getting involved with a complainant who was taking on someone like Pell, Maguire had another motivation to help Scott, the book explains: ‘He wanted his beloved Church to be free of the taint of ever trying to cover up any kind of allegations involving the evil of child abuse.’ Maguire had good reason for this—he had been working in the very same parish with an abuser, Vincent Kiss, and had been stung by the revelation that the priest had deceived him. Kiss was jailed in 1993 for defrauding four charities. When he left prison he was promptly re-arrested for child sex charges and pleaded guilty to abusing four boys. Scott too knew of the publicity around the Kiss case. ‘The Father Vincent Kiss case had been a sickening jolt for [Father Bob] and he was determined that the Church always be prepared to be accountable for any past and present sins, however unlikely.’
‘What was I to do?’ Maguire told his biographer of the Scott dilemma. ‘I couldn’t turn my back on the bloke who came to me. I was in a position of trust, and he’d come to me for help. I couldn’t tell him to go away and just shut up about it. But I knew that if I supported him, I could be making a powerful enemy too. That could be the end of me, and my work.’
Maguire changes his mind depending on when you talk to him about whether the Scott business was the straw that broke the camel’s back in ending his career as parish priest at South Melbourne. Whether the powerful enemy he made in Pell was, as he said it might be, the end of him and his work. Certainly, when the priest turned seventy-five in 2009, Pell’s anointed successor and great friend, Denis Hart, personally arrived at Maguire’s parish presbytery and told him to hand in his resignation. This was a departure from the usual protocols, which require that the priest hand in his resignation, but then very commonly the Archbishop will refuse to take it (that’s what happened with Pell himself as Cardinal in the Vatican in 2016—the Pope refused his resignation). Maguire was given a stay of execution until 2012 and Hart released a statement saying the decision to ask him to go was because of financial mismanagement. Maguire thought it was largely because his more liberal Vatican II–style ministry clashed with the rigidity of the likes of Hart and Pell.
One way or the other, Maguire’s decision to back a complainant against Pell can’t have helped when he was pleading his case against Hart. But as we spoke in his South Melbourne office that day, he said something interesting about the psychology of a priest that has stayed with me and informed my responses to revelations about abuse by paedophile clergy. ‘We priests,’ he explains, ‘we’re psychosocially damaged. We’re crystallised in adolescence. Of course we are. How could we be any other? We haven’t had mature adult relationships. We’re stuck, in many ways, at the age when we entered the seminary. So we have problems. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t. Not having meaningful relationships does something to you. It stunts your psychological growth, being celibate, being alone. I’ll admit it.’
It’s a brave admission, and no doubt one that some priests would passionately dispute, but, truth be told, you can see it in him. He flits from subject to subject. He is a compassionate, thoughtful and intelligent man, but engaging on a deeper level one on one sometimes just seems to get the better of him. His eye contact is patchy at best. He changes the subject, makes jokes, obfuscates, plays a part and does his razzle-dazzle, funny, witty, slightly mad priest routine.
But despite his eccentric demeanour, the business about being psychosocially damaged rings true. Several other priests—some still serving, some laicised, to whom I have spoken for this book, have also mentioned this limitation. Those who have left say it has taken years to readjust as they emerged, 30- or even 40-year-old virgins. And in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Father Eric Bryant, who was in Ballarat a colleague of Pell’s on Mulkearns’ consultors committee, put it this way:
The Church, like a lot of other male institutions, are places for people to hide … For the priesthood, a lot of young people went into the priesthood 15, 16 years of age and were not mature enough, they didn’t know their own sexuality or anything else like that. They say a male doesn’t develop that knowledge until he’s 25 or 26 nowadays. And we had young people going in who were just out of school, they were taken away from their families, and I think things happened there.
Michael Leahy, who went through Corpus Christi just behind Pell, told the Royal Commission in a submission that by compulsorily depriving men ‘of healthy, holy sexual relationships’ over a period of centuries, it establishes the clergy as a ‘caste within the Church’. And ‘it is very difficult to see how the members of that caste can avoid distorted views of such relationships and of sexuality generally,’ Leahy says. The priests are, he says, denied ‘opportunities to confront and express rationally one’s own sexuality’, but more disturbingly, a ‘hiding place’ is provided ‘for those wishing to avoid confrontation such as rationalisations in religious terms of deviant inclinations’.
Pell was, of course, one of these people whisked away (by his own ardent volition) from his family before he reached significant maturity. Pell is not the sort of person I can imagine ever admitting to a weakness like being psychosocially damaged. But I think that day, when Maguire rambled in his office, that this is what he was getting at—that this applied to Pell too. And this is one of the reasons why, apart from the respect he had already developed for Phil Scott in his community, and his priestly duty to support people in their hardest hour, that it was Maguire who made the first phone call to the Church’s National Council for Professional Standards on Scott’s behalf.
The timing of the phone call was provoked by Scott seeing something in the papers which piqued his interest. On 8 June 2002, the Melbourne and Sydney archdioceses had put full-page ads in the metro newspapers, apologising to all Church abuse victims and giving a Church telephone number for survivors to call. The staff at Broken Rites noted sardonically that the ad provided no corresponding phone number for police sexual offences units, where victims could report allegations.
The ad got Scott’s blood boiling again. That day, he telephoned Broken Rites again. It had been two years and one month since his previous call. Scott said he still intended to make a report to Church authorities about what had happened on Phillip Island in 1961. The Broken Rites advocate told Scott about Towards Healing, and how he might proceed. Scott got back on the phone to Maguire. And Maguire got on the phone on his behalf.
After several phone calls with Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, Scott was offered a sit-down meeting on 11 June with Sister Angela Ryan. While the transcription of that meeting was being checked and corrected by Ryan and Scott over the course of following days, both Maguire and Scott spoke to Robinson again, who was still very keen to get the police involved. It is not an exaggeration to say that there was much angst at NCPS headquarters. All concerned realised that there were no winners in the present scenario—including themselves. No matter how delicately they trod, they were likely to put a rather sharp stiletto onto a toenail. They had a jittery complainant who didn’t like cops, a respondent in Pell who was, frankly, terrifying. And a media that was likely to go completely feral.
On 19 June, after Scott received the finalised transcription of his interview, he waited to see what the NCPS was going to do. And waited. Five weeks passed in which he heard nothing. On 13 July, Scott picked up the phone again to see what was going on. Robinson told him that the case could not go through Towards Healing because the rules forbade a complaint against an archbishop. On 17 July, Scott wrote to Robinson, expressing his disappointment at the NCPS’ failure to act. Robinson wrote back with a compromise solution, a compromise which Robinson felt was inadequate. ‘All I could offer you was to set up a process that would imitate the process of Towards Healing, that is, it would appoint assessors who would question the two parties and witnesses and give them a finding … [However] if he [Pell] denied everything, this process would not have teeth and would not be able to enforce its finding,’ Robinson wrote.
By August, the rumour mill had started. Journalists were starting to make calls to Church officials to ask if there was to be an inquiry into Pell. On 1 August, Robinson contacted Scott through Maguire and said that he was setting up an ‘imitative’ inquiry, that is, like Towards Healing. Scott was told that there would be two ‘assessors’ appointed. Both of the assessors, it transpired, were former police officers. One of them was a former member of the Gaming Squad, who, Scott said, had charged him in the early 1980s. Scott was most displeased. Scott smelled a rat, but it could well have just been a coincidence. Broken Rites staff pointed out that as Towards Healing promises that assessors be independent of the Church authority, the complainant and the accused, this would have constituted a breach of protocols.
On 7 August, the Indymedia piece appeared. The campaign by newspapers to find out more stepped up. And then, on 19 August, The Age faxed a bunch of questions to the Sydney Archdiocese. The archdiocese did not send answers, instead saying there would be a big announcement the following day. When the stories appeared in the newspapers as they dropped in the wee hours of 21 August, the counterattack on Scott had already begun. Who dug up the dirt has not been revealed. But the Church was already using ‘assessors’, who were essentially private investigators employed in these sorts of investigations. One way or the other, the first newspaper reports which broke news of the announcement referred to Scott’s criminal past.
‘Church sources said last night that the man making the accusations against Dr Pell had a long criminal history,’ The Age reported on 21 August. ‘He had been convicted of various offences including drug trafficking.’ As the slaying of Scott’s reputation began, Pell accrued some very powerful public cheerleaders. The Prime Minister, no less. ‘I believe completely George Pell’s denial,’ John Howard told reporters. ‘I rang him this evening and spoke to him. They are, of course, very serious allegations and he’s done the right thing in standing aside and the Church has done the right thing to have the allegations fully investigated.’ Pell’s friend and fellow Santamaria-devotee Tony Abbott, then Workplace Relations Minister, also weighed in. He told reporters Pell was ‘the most combative, forthright and most effective ecclesiastical leader Australia has seen since Danny Mannix’.
‘That means George Pell is a target for all sorts of people, some well-meaning, some malevolent,’ Abbott said.
‘It should not surprise any Christian that there would be people who want to make unfair, wrong, mischievous, malevolent accusations against the strongest and most public Christian of the time. I’m more than ready to accept Pell’s testimony.’
Of course, just like all the other people who jump to the prima facie defence of alleged child abusers before they know any of the details of the case, Howard and Abbott couldn’t possibly know what really went on because they weren’t there and didn’t know the detail. They were just springing to support the person who was accused as the abuser. It’s a fascinating and pervasive social phenomenon and not one you can really demonise Howard and Abbott for because it is so incredibly widespread. People don’t want to believe that someone they know—especially an eminent and high profile person they have respected—has damaged little kids. But here’s the thing: it’s a decidedly handy social phenomenon if you happen to be white, male, powerful and an abuser of children. Because generally, people seem to somehow find it difficult to believe an accuser’s word against these sorts of men.
Scott told Maguire he just wanted to be believed. And he wanted Pell to own up. Pell, on the other hand, was furious at what he was describing as a mendacious slur. At best, a delusion. At worst, a sinful lie. But Scott’s lawyer Peter Ward reflected that the gross imbalance of power between a former wharfie and one of the Catholic Church’s most senior figures was profound. Dr Pell, as he was still then known before he made Cardinal, had obtained the finest legal counsel money could buy. Jeff Sher, QC, had been at the bar four decades, three as silk, and was known for his tenacity and toughness. He was described by his colleague at the bar, now a Supreme Court Judge, Kate McMillan, SC, as having a ‘reputation as a clinical, merciless courtroom interrogator and infighter’. He had a list of wealthy and powerful clients and in his civil work had won the largest damages payouts ever recorded at the time. Colleagues joked that Sher despised mediation—this was a Queen’s Counsel who was built to fight and win. Pell and his solicitors don’t muck about when they appoint counsel.
The Southwell Inquiry commenced on 30 September 2002 and ran for five days at a Melbourne hotel. The retired Supreme Court justice Alec Southwell was chosen carefully. It was important that he was not a Catholic so it was not considered a stitch-up in favour of Pell. While on the bench, he was considered a ‘straight shooter’ and his judgements in sexual assault matters had not been entirely predictable. For instance, he disagreed with his colleagues on the Full Court of the Victorian Supreme Court when they freed paedophile priest Father Michael Glennon because they determined that a ‘name and shame’ campaign by then-broadcaster, now-Senator, Derryn Hinch prevented the priest getting a fair trial. In his dissenting judgement, Southwell said the court was creating ‘legal history by finding that in a large city, adverse media publicity must be held to have had the result that a person charged with a serious offence will never be called upon to face trial’. However, Southwell was also one of the Full Court Judges who decided that raping a prostitute was a lesser crime than raping a ‘chaste’ woman.
During the hearing, Southwell heard from a string of witnesses. No-one—not the other seminarians, nor the students who could be contacted—could remember any abuse, as described by Scott, taking place. Scott’s mate Michael Foley, whom he said had also been abused, had died seventeen years before in a bar fight. Foley’s family was contacted by private investigators hired by the Pell camp and some members of the family told The Age they were most displeased at this intrusion. But they said that Foley had not disclosed anything about the Smiths Beach allegations to them.
There was, though, one witness, known to the inquiry as ‘H’, who did have some recollections, which suggested very strongly that all was not well at the camp. H remembered both Scott and Pell being at the camp. He remembered ‘various frolicking activities’ and also a night walk where the boys were walking in a spread-out fashion (‘Indian file’, Scott called it). He remembered the 1961 camp as being his last, although Southwell pointed out in his report that parish records show him on a camp in 1962—demonstrating ‘the great difficulty of fact finding in relation to incidents occurring 40 years ago’.
H said he remembered Foley well. He said that while Foley was several months younger than he, Foley ‘always tended to look after me a bit’. And there was something else. ‘He came up to me and he said to me one day, “Just watch out for Big George”.’ After that incident, H told the inquiry, he gave Big George a wide berth. ‘I didn’t get too close to him.’ He didn’t inquire further about what Foley meant when he cautioned him about the seminarian, because, he said, ‘it was the way he said it. I assumed.’
Other former altar boys gave evidence that Pell was popular, and Scott said he was kind and gentle, and was not a disciplinarian, not given to violence. Thus, Southwell later reasoned in his report, Foley ‘had no reason to think that H was at risk of a belting or some other unpleasant punishment’—that is, the ‘watch out’ was not ambiguous. The ‘watch out’ had a sexual connotation. And that is what H said in his signed statement—he ‘presumed there was a sexual context of the warning’.
The evidence of H is the sort of thing that causes journalists and other students of true crime to prick up their ears. It seems to corroborate. It’s a pretty astonishing recollection, all those years later. What? Another kid was warned about Pell? That kid was told Pell was dodgy? But alas (for Scott, at least) in a criminal trial, Sher pointed out, that evidence would not have been admissible. And even though this wasn’t a criminal trial per se, the judge agreed. ‘Evidence of what an eleven-year-old boy “assumed” about a possibly misunderstood “warning” is no sound basis for adverse findings in an inquiry of this nature,’ Southwell later wrote. However, the judge admitted that he wrestled with whether the warning itself should be included. He decided, ‘not without hesitation’, that ‘given the very serious nature of this proceeding, and the possible ambiguity of the warning, I should put it aside’.
Southwell also put aside another thing which to a lay observer seems pretty compelling: that H heard that Foley had lit a fire at Smiths Beach. ‘This inquiry is not, of course, investigating the question whether [Foley] was molested, and the only evidence of that came from the complainant,’ Southwell wrote in his report. ‘There is, in my opinion, too tenuous a connection for that evidence to go into the scales against [Pell].’
A crucial witness who gave evidence to the inquiry was Phil Scott’s first wife, known to the inquiry as ‘Mrs C’. She and Scott had children together, but had separated in the early 1990s—a decade before the inquiry. She was important because she could give what is known in these cases as ‘evidence of first complaint’. Mrs C told the inquiry that she had a ‘clear recollection’ of Scott first having a conversation with her in 1975 or 1976—so it was about fourteen years after the Phillip Island camp took place. Mrs C remembered that Scott said that when he was an altar boy at a camp at Phillip Island, he had been interfered with by ‘a big bastard called George’. Mrs C also told the inquiry that Scott had informed her that Michael Foley had been ‘involved in it’. Mrs C was ‘shocked’ by what her then-husband had disclosed, but as soon as it had been raised, the topic of conversation was abandoned again and it was, she said, ‘swept under the carpet’. Mrs C heard little else of Big George until she received a telephone call, she said, from her former husband, in about July 2000. Scott expressed astonishment to her on the phone that he had just recognised that the man he knew as Big George, his molester, was George Pell. Mrs C hadn’t the faintest idea who Pell was. ‘He’s an archbishop,’ her husband replied, she told the inquiry.
Sher tried to discredit Mrs C’s account. ‘How could she remember a common name like “George” after all those years?’ Sher mused in his closing address. But Southwell dismissed that thought. ‘I regarded her as an impressive witness,’ the judge found, ‘who had a clear recollection of a startling statement.’
Southwell said that the recollections of Mrs C, which he believed, certainly could rebut the suggestions by the Pell camp that Scott was motivated by a desire for compensation. ‘In 1975 there was no compensation scheme such as is now in place … There really could be no valid suggestion of any evidence pointing to a desire,’ the judge mused. He also noted that the first time that compensation ever came up was when Scott talked to Bernard Barrett of Broken Rites—who informed Scott of his rights under the Melbourne Response. Despite the fact that Mrs C’s evidence might not have been admitted more generally in court, the judge decided that it should stay ‘in’, as it were. It could, Southwell found, be used in a criminal trial to rebut evidence that the ‘Big George’ allegations were a recent invention.
There were issues with some aspects of Scott’s recollection—for instance, Scott remembers that when he saw Pell on television and recognised him to be ‘Big George’, he believed the Archbishop was wearing purple robes. But the priest who was responsible for dressing Pell gave evidence that while at some formal functions he did wear a purple robe, it was covered by a white surplice. Sher also tendered videotapes of television programs in which Pell had been seen that year and guess what? No purple robes. It was, Sher told the inquiry, highly unlikely that Pell had ever been seen in any purple robe on television at any time.
Memory does strange things when it comes to visual descriptions of people.
Southwell had clearly given these issues some thought too, because he did not hang his hat on the verity of the purple robe memory. ‘I do not accept it as disproving that at some time around the middle of 2000, the complainant observed the respondent on television,’ he said.
There were also issues with Scott’s interview with Sister Angela Ryan—he at first told her that he had seen Pell on television in 2000 because he was being appointed Archbishop of Sydney; however, Pell had not been appointed to Sydney until March 2001. Scott later said he thought Ryan was ‘leading’ him. But he had signed off on the changes made to the transcript of his interview and, indeed, made some corrections. This was the only part of Scott’s evidence where the judge thought that perhaps Scott was not being entirely truthful. The judge believed Scott had been caught out and was trying to backtrack. But again, the judge did not think it meant that Scott was not telling the truth in other capacities. ‘The fact that I think his evidence concerning the [Ryan] interview was unsatisfactory does not lead to a finding that the whole of his evidence must be rejected,’ Southwell said. ‘But it does mean that where credit assumes the very great importance that it does in this case, I must view all his evidence with caution.’
As for Scott’s motive for complaint, despite the best efforts of the Pell legal team and, undoubtedly, the private investigators employed by it, Southwell noted that they had not unearthed any evidence which suggested some other ‘spite or malice’ on the part of Scott towards Pell or even the Church in general. The judge pointed out that, on the other hand, Pell had a ‘strong motive to push memory of these fleeting incidents by a 19-year-old to the recesses of the mind, from which there could be no recall’. If this was a judge ‘completely exonerating’ someone, as Pell would claim, then it didn’t read like that.
The journalists who first wrote about the Southwell Inquiry when it was initially announced were leaked fairly scant information by ‘Church sources’ about Scott’s past. Then, on 6 October, the Sunday Herald Sun exposed the lot. ‘Altar Boy’s Life of Crime’, the headline blared. There in a 2-page spread was the full, inglorious criminal history of Scott. Scott was infuriated to see they had also photographed him from behind outside his home.
There is no escaping the fact that Scott had not been an angel. Far from it. The Southwell Inquiry heard that he had had thirty-nine convictions from twenty court appearances. The vast bulk of these were drink-driving and assault convictions in the 1970s when he was an alcoholic. Scott’s problem with alcohol ended more or less at the end of the seventies and from the 1980s, he began to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. But there were other offences in the 1980s—relating to SP bookmaking. He was also hauled before the infamous Costigan Royal Commission in relation to his time as a member of the Painters and Dockers union (Scott was on the union’s executive for six years) and was fined for contempt for failing to answer questions. He avoided tax and he had several bank accounts to aid in pursuing his bookie business.
But perhaps the most serious issue for Scott was his 1995 conviction for dealing speed, for which he served two years in prison. At that time, the sentencing judge acknowledged, Scott was sober, a good dad and generous with his time to those less fortunate than him. So dealing amphetamines was a major slip-up, to put it mildly. If it hadn’t been for the drug dealing, Scott could have said his criminal past was ancient history. But the drug dealing was just seven years before. He’d done time. It was really, really embarrassing.
For his part, Southwell thought Scott’s criminal record was more notable for ‘alcohol and violence than dishonesty’. ‘However,’ continued the judge, ‘there is sufficient evidence of dishonesty to demonstrate that the complainant’s evidence must be scrutinised with special care.’ And it would be difficult, he believed, to support Scott’s version above Pell’s without the supporting evidence of other witnesses, or circumstantial evidence.
In the end, Southwell was not convinced that Scott was a liar. The character assassination did not succeed on that front. ‘I did not form a positively adverse view of him as a witness,’ Southwell said. The judge accepted the evidence of Michael Tovey, QC, the smooth and skilled advocate who was appointed Counsel Assisting the inquiry, who said that Scott, when talking about the events at Phillip Island, ‘gave the impression that he was speaking honestly from an actual recollection’. But the judge still couldn’t find that the complaint was upheld. He had the same view of Pell. ‘[Pell] also gave me the impression that he was speaking the truth,’ Southwell remarked.
That being the case, the judge had to return to several issues surrounding the credibility of the parties: the very long delay, ‘some valid criticism of the complainant’s credibility’, the lack of corroborative evidence. Southwell had to find that he was ‘not satisfied that the complaint has been established’. So in the end, the character assassination of Scott was successful—it achieved its intended aim—to keep Pell as Archbishop of Sydney.
Pell has always described this result as his exoneration. ‘I am grateful to God that this ordeal is over and that the inquiry has exonerated me of all allegations,’ he said at the time. ‘There’s no mud to stick, I’ve been exonerated.’ Even though many lawyers who have studied the finding will tell you it was most certainly not an exoneration. It was nil-all. Or one-all.
Which is why, despite the humiliation of having his life analysed, his criminal record exposed, being photographed unknowingly outside his home, and forever being tagged as the altar boy who turned to a life of crime, Scott was happy with the Southwell finding. He felt, Scott’s solicitor Peter Ward tells me, that Southwell had been fair. He hadn’t expected a fair fight and he hadn’t expected a fair finding. But he got the fair finding, he thought. Southwell believed him. That is, he thought he was telling the truth. For Phil Scott, that was enough.
Ward believes Pell’s lawyers made a huge tactical error in closing submissions. Southwell gave the parties a choice before he retired to consider his finding. He could, he said, give them simply the finding—that is, whether or not the matter was substantiated. Or he could give reasons for that finding too. Ward thinks that Pell’s lawyers expected a roasting of Scott and that it would play very well for their client for the reasons to be published. So they opted for the reasons. It did not play very well for their client. Had the simple fact of the finding been published, Pell would have been right in saying he was completely exonerated, but the reasons showed the judge’s decision was qualified. There were passages in it that were not helpful for Pell. The judge believed the kid from Braybrook, who turned into a guy with a criminal record. But there just wasn’t enough contemporaneous corroborative evidence to legally find that it definitively happened.
This detail was reported at the time, but for a huge story like that, its impact was blunted. Because in October 2002, a massive news event eclipsed everything in its path. A great tragedy for hundreds of people became a blessing, of sorts, for Pell. On the Saturday night of 12 October, Jemaah Islamiah terrorists set off bombs in the Sari nightclub in Kuta, the tourist district of Denpasar in Bali, killing 202 people including 88 Australians. It was the biggest Australian news story in years.
The Southwell Inquiry had concluded its deliberations on 4 October. It’s unclear who dictated the terms of release, including the date, but it was an inquiry run by the Catholic Church. The Church released the report to the media on Monday 14 October. The Bali bombings were on the Saturday night and the report landed 36 hours after the attacks—on the Monday. It’s not to say that the Southwell report wasn’t covered—it was. But a story that would otherwise be huge was buried. The victims’ rights groups believed that it was an example of ‘taking out the trash’—like when a government releases a negative departmental report just as the horses are entering the barriers for the Melbourne Cup. It rolls off the newsroom fax machines and pops into the email inboxes just as the nation’s heads are collectively turned.
Whether or not it was a deliberate trash-taking exercise, in many ways it worked. The simple message conveyed was that Pell would still be Archbishop of Sydney. He was ‘cleared’. It is certainly how I, who was at the time a young reporter very wrapped up in the aftermath of the bombings, saw it.
Archbishop Pell’s first job after being reinstated at St Mary’s Cathedral was a mass for the victims of the bombings. Afterwards he told columnist Miranda Devine:
‘One of the unusual Christian teachings is that you can draw good out of evil … For someone with no religion, suffering is a brute fact you have to try to ensure with dignity. For a Christian, you can hope this suffering can be transmuted into something of benefit—if not for you, but for others.’
Devine surmised that Pell’s darkest hour had only strengthened him. It most certainly did not impede his path to ecclesiastical glory. Almost a year to the day that the Southwell Inquiry had commenced, Pope John Paul II appointed George Pell a Cardinal.