THE CHOIRBOYS
Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.
Immanuel Kant
One of the things that has helped George Pell and his defenders to bat off or gloss over the allegations of Lyndon Monument and Damian Dignan is what has been cast in some quarters as the ambiguity of the behaviour. It’s the notion that this was simply ‘horseplay’ or ‘a bit of rough and tumble’ and that Monument and Dignan, damaged men, had simply misinterpreted what was going on. That is a highly questionable premise, but it remains in public discourse. Public discourse still so often weighted to protecting the accused and doubting the accuser.
Whatever the supposed ambiguity of these alleged actions, they were not actions befitting an archbishop or a cardinal. They are said to have happened when Pell was a relatively young priest. As Father Pell rose through the ranks of the Church, even at its most innocent interpretation, what happened at the Eureka Pool was too risky for a man of his stature to risk question marks over his reputation.
The story of The Kid and The Choirboy has no such ambiguity. For if what was told to Taskforce SANO at Victoria Police in a sworn statement and disclosed to a tiny circle of people is true, what it was alleged Pell did to those two 13-year-old boys at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne is his biggest slip-up of all. If true, it is a horrible crime. And in its aftermath came heartbreaking consequences. Moreover, by the time it’s said to have happened, Pell was Archbishop of Melbourne. By that time, Pell had set up the Melbourne Response to tackle the problem in his archdiocese of clergy child abuse. If these allegations are true, they point to utter, sinful, hypocrisy.
This is the story of two teenage boys sent on scholarships from what were then Melbourne’s inner suburbs to a Catholic boys’ school—St Kevin’s College. St Kevin’s is in Toorak, Melbourne’s most exclusive precinct. The school is wedged between the Kooyong Tennis Club and the Yarra River and closed behind grand iron gates with gilded lettering. The boys wear boater hats and navy blazers, candy-striped with emerald and gold. While the area the boys came from has now gentrified, in the 1990s it might as well have been a different planet from Toorak.
I’m not at liberty to name the boys—complainants of sexual assault and their families have a legal right to anonymity and it has been requested here. I’ve called them The Kid and The Choirboy. The boys got their ticket to St Kevin’s because they could sing. The choirmaster from St Patrick’s Cathedral had sent scouts to the Catholic primary schools around Melbourne’s suburbs to find boys on the cusp of puberty who had the voices of angels. In return for their vocal skills, the boys received choral scholarships to St Kevin’s. When The Kid remembers it, he has tears in his eyes. ‘It was a dream of my mum and I, that I could go to this incredible private school that we could never afford, she was so proud,’ he says. The Choirboy’s mum, whom I’ll call Mary, had no idea her boy had this talent.
‘But it was good, you know?’ Mary says, smiling at the memory. ‘A nice scholarship for a good education.’
It was to be a big commitment for the families but the boys were very enthusiastic. The working parents carpooled to help with the commute. The Choirboy threw himself into his new role as he did everything in life. ‘Oh my god, everything had to be done yesterday,’ Mary laughs. ‘[He] would disappear from sun up to sun down … He was just gung-ho, you know?’ Weekends were filled with song. The choristers were expected to sing from the first day of term one to Christmas Day. The boy loved it.
In 1997, the last year that The Choirboy and The Kid spent in the choir, the bluestone gothic pile known as The Cathedral Church and Minor Basilica of St Patrick, or simply, St Patrick’s Cathedral, was celebrating a centenary since its consecration. Huge celebrations were planned and in its honour, the boys were to perform Handel’s Messiah. The sounds of ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hal-le-lu-jah!’ echoed around the sacristies and the nave. His Grace, Archbishop George Pell was to say the mass.
Other boys, now men, who were in the choir at the time remember Archbishop Pell being a regular presence in their lives. During May 2016, I called as many of the fifty choristers from the time as I could muster. I think I got to about thirty-five. Of those left, the remainder were either adult or much older members, a couple of overseas visitors, a handful who could just not be found and one or two who chose not to answer my calls or messages. Several are now high-profile singers and musicians. The boys would practise four days a week, and two of those sessions would be at St Patrick’s Cathedral. Pell would drop in to watch the singing from time to time. Some of the guys also remember him joining the annual camp they attended at Easter to prepare for the holy season’s masses. He would say mass for the boys at the camp.
The Choirboy’s older sister remembers he was a very amiable boy. ‘He always liked company as well, he always had to have someone with him all the time and he was, he was a great kid. [He] was, as a child, just a normal child.’
But at some point between his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, The Choirboy’s enthusiasm waned considerably. ‘Little murmurs, you know? Like, he was tired, you know, of the commitment to getting up early in the morning to practise,’ Mary says. The boys would start their rehearsals an hour before school two days a week and also on Sundays before mass. They’d also have evening sessions at the cathedral once a week. The lead-up to Holy Week at Easter was terribly busy. Mary’s son began to grumble about getting up to go. Mary just put it down to his teenage years. Then, one day, he snapped. ‘Yeah, just out of the blue, “I don’t want to be in the choir any more”,’ she remembers. ‘And we said, “Well you do realise we can’t afford the school fees?”’ And he said, “Yeah”, and I said, “Well, think about it”, I said, “We can’t do anything till the end of the year and you can’t really swap and change”.’
Mary was not pleased. She says for her family, the St Kevin’s school fees were ‘astronomical’, and it seemed a shame to miss out on the rest of the school experience just because her son was weary of choir. But the boy was immovable. One of the other choristers volunteered to me that there was a boy who had that year become difficult at school. He couldn’t remember the name at first. I listed a random selection of other names from the choir, with The Choirboy’s buried in it. ‘That’s it!’ his former classmate remembered. He told me The Choirboy became difficult at school—angry and a bit of a bully.
Certainly, while his photograph from the year before shows a cherubic young boy with a bowl haircut, in 1997 his face has hardened. He is frowning. His friend, The Kid, has a strange look on his face. In that photograph, The Kid doesn’t look at all like the handsome young man I met at the RSL. The Choirboy’s father, whom I will call John and who separated from his wife many years ago, said before his son was about fourteen, he had always been very well-behaved ‘and all of a sudden to change from being well-behaved to that was a bit of a mystery’. The boy became disengaged and disruptive at school. His parents and school were so concerned that in September 1997 they brought him to see a psychiatrist at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. The assessment, which John has kept, found the boy was of average intelligence and had been a good student. But his grades had been slipping, and while a friendly enough boy, his answers now tended to the monosyllabic, his responses were ‘under-elaborated’ and his working memory was affected.
At the end of the year, The Choirboy was to be a chorister no more—he was moved out of St Kevin’s to a more affordable local Catholic secondary. ‘I just put it down to him being a teenager and deciding he’d had enough—that it was, you know, too tiring,’ Mary says.
That very same year, his friend, The Kid, had also made the same firm decision to get out of the choir as soon as he possibly could. His behaviour at school also became a problem. His voice had broken and, no longer a soprano, his choir days were numbered. He too had gone to another Catholic school, and the families rarely saw each other. The boys drifted apart.
Mary’s daughter noticed a marked difference in her little brother from that point. ‘Looking back, yeah, his whole personality, well, he changed. He did. He wasn’t the same person as what he was beforehand,’ she says.
‘His life spiralled,’ Mary says. ‘It really did spiral.’ Her daughter nods and presses her lips together.
Mary and her daughter are sitting on a sofa in Mary’s living room in her unit in a suburb of Melbourne. They are hospitable and decent women, unpretentious and plainly dressed. They have been searching for answers for what happened to their son and brother for years. Mary lives alone—her daughter is bringing up a young family. Mary works in a shop and tries to make sense of life. But her sparse little unit is a house of grief. While she is stoic and does not make a fuss about the raw deal that the past few years have dealt her, her mouth betrays her. It’s permanently slightly drawn down at the corners. She’s a woman who has had a full-time job keeping a son together and now he’s gone. After it happened, she was left scratching her head, making meals for one and wondering how it all went so wrong. Until The Kid came along.
The year after he left the choir, The Choirboy got into drugs. In a big way. While at age thirteen he had sung Handel’s Messiah, clad in a choirboy’s crimson and white robes, eyes cast up to heaven, by his fourteenth year, he was already dabbling in heroin. ‘It’s devastating to watch your child spiral like that,’ Mary says, shaking her head at the memory of anger, frustration, heartbreak that she dealt with in equal parts. The Choirboy became like one of the disengaged young men that Carolyn Quadrio charts in her research.
John had worked as an honorary probation officer for many years and he saw the same behaviour in his son as in the juvenile justice kids he worked with, who were often victims of abuse. ‘I met a lot of young offenders of that age—and they are different. They behave differently, their mannerisms are different. That’s the way [my son] was going and yet there was no reason for why he should be that way.’
His sister watched her brother completely withdraw. ‘I think from my point of view, he changed to a point where you know, he was in his own world,’ she says. The teenager changed friendship groups. He stopped talking. ‘He just became very distant, very enclosed,’ she says. ‘It was embarrassing for me because, looking back, I didn’t know why or what this stemmed from and how this was …’ She trails off. ‘It was embarrassing for me as a sister that I had a brother that was like this.’
For Mary, it was harrowing to watch her son constantly chasing heroin. Every now and then, he’d go to rehab and she’d have to drive him somewhere to help him score because you wouldn’t get in to a program if too much time had lapsed since your last hit. It was mind-boggling for a decent woman who thought she’d brought up two great kids, given them the best education she could. From time to time, her son would report that he had bumped into The Kid somewhere when he was out socialising with his mates. He told his mum that The Kid was ‘struggling a bit’. She asked her son was it drugs, too? But no, it wasn’t drugs, he answered. He was just ‘struggling’. Her son was a young man of few words, and at the time, The Kid’s struggles had no meaning for her, and so she didn’t inquire any further.
Her son’s heroin chase went on for about fifteen years. The Choirboy never had a career, was never able to hold down much of a job. He was a devoted uncle to his small niece and nephew and Mary says he was, despite it all, a loving and good son. He lived with his mum and she was sometimes questioned about why she didn’t kick him out. But Mary knew she was all her son had. ‘I care about my son, I love my son, that’s my son,’ she says, speaking in the present tense of a mother who still struggles to come to terms with the fact that her youngest child is now a past-tense concept. ‘If I don’t care about him, no-one else is going to care about him—simple as that.’
The Choirboy died in 2014. He was thirty. Mary told almost everyone she knew that he died in a car crash. But it wasn’t a car accident. It was a heroin overdose. She says she just didn’t want the shame and the pity. All that’s left of him now is a poorly tended Facebook page with a poorly taken profile picture. He’s not smiling.
Mary’s daughter kept her mum’s secret too. ‘I have never told anybody, only one of my closest friends ever knew,’ she says. ‘I told everybody it was because of a car accident because I don’t want to have to explain to people that, you know, my brother lived half his life as a drug addict, and a heavy one at that.’
The funeral was on a Thursday in 2014. The sort of day when, all those years before, Mary would be packing her son off to St Pat’s to sing his little heart out in the cathedral. Now she was preparing him to be buried. Although she had informed The Kid, she was still slightly surprised to see the young man respectfully take his place in a pew. In the following months, Mary would occasionally see The Kid when he came into the shop where she worked. They’d have a small chat. He was a well-brought-up boy, she thought. He’d always give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
Months later, Mary was serving customers at work when she received a telephone call from a detective from Victoria Police. Immediately she assumed they were trying to pin something on her son. ‘I said, “You do realise [my son] passed away?”’ And they said they did and they passed on their condolences. And the detective mentioned something about sexual assault. ‘Well, I nearly fell over,’ she says. ‘And I said, “You can hang a lot of things on my son, but that’s not one thing you can hang on my son”.’
Of course, the detective wasn’t referring to her son as a perpetrator. He wanted to know if her son had told her about anything that he’d borne witness to or experienced during his time at St Patrick’s or St Kevin’s. Mary was shocked. ‘And I’ve gone, “Oh, I don’t know anything about that one, you know, I have no knowledge”,’ she remembers. The Taskforce SANO detectives then came to take a statement from Mary. She was completely in the dark about what had happened. And in her confusion, a new trauma came flooding back.
‘I was floored,’ Mary says. ‘I’ve buried a son, I’ve lost a son due to a drug overdose—which is not a nice way to lose a child. And then I get this into my life.’ Scenes from the last fifteen years of her son’s life began to flicker through her mind in fast motion. She was wracked with questions and struggled to sleep.
After the police went to see Mary, they also visited her ex-husband. ‘Nothing shocks me; I’ve seen a lot of stuff,’ John explains. ‘But that did shock me. But then, when I mulled it over, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “that’s making sense”.’ The visit, which police only expected to take an hour, took five. John gave the police the medical reports and other documentation about his son and signed a statement.
One evening, some time after the detectives took Mary’s statement, The Kid happened to come by when Mary was on the late shift. The shop was empty. She decided to have the conversation with him that she suspected would upset her, but she needed to know. ‘I just asked him if I could ask him what happened. If, you know, if it wasn’t going to upset him. Because I didn’t want to upset this person, um, because [my son’s] passed away. I didn’t want to bring back bad memories for him.’ But The Kid understood immediately. ‘He said, “No, no, ask me”. I asked him if my son was a victim and he said, “Yes”.’ Her son was a victim, he was saying, of George Pell.
Mary was overcome with a hot rush of anger. Not at The Kid, but at her son, for not telling her. Because Mary had asked her son. Not just once. Something inside of her, some mother’s intuition perhaps born in the shock after her boy went so quickly and spectacularly off the rails, had made her suspect that he had been a victim of abuse. ‘I asked [him], I can’t remember the words I used, whether he was touched up, or played with, and [he] told me “no”.’ The boy shrugged. She says shrugging was something her son would sometimes do when he didn’t want to talk about things. She still had a niggling feeling something was up. ‘I never said anything to anybody,’ she says. ‘And then, again, after a while, I asked him and again he told me “no”. And then I get this. And I was just so angry with [him],’ she says, closing her eyes at the memory of it, ‘for not telling me. So angry. Sometimes I’m still very angry.’
The Kid gently told her what he says happened with the Archbishop. ‘He told me that himself and [my son] used to play in the back of the Church in the closed-off rooms,’ she says.
‘In the cathedral?’ I ask her.
‘In the cathedral, yep. And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.’ The Kid still remembered the incident so clearly. Being picked up afterwards by his parents. Staring out the car window on the way home. Mary swallows and looks at me in disgust. Her daughter, who has tears in her eyes, keeps her gaze on her mother.
‘What went through your mind, as a mother, when you heard that,’ I venture quietly.
‘Oh angry,’ she says, sighing and stiffening her back. ‘Angry, as I said, at [my son], for not telling me, but also angry at the Catholic Church. I sent my child there—I sent both of my children there— for an education, to be safe. You send your kids to school to be safe. Not to have this done.’
‘It’s devastating,’ her daughter says, ‘because it helps to explain a lot of incidents in his life. And yeah, it’s devastating, it is, it’s devastating …’ The daughter says she believes that her brother never spoke up about it because he was a very private person. ‘And he didn’t like to share a lot of information and I think, as a young boy, you are embarrassed. You don’t want to tell people that another man, let alone a priest, has touched you in any way. You might not think that people believe you. People might judge you, people might say things about you. There could be so many reasons as to why he didn’t want to tell us.’
Mary shares this suspicion, but it breaks her heart. ‘I would like to think that if [he] would have told me, I would have believed my son. I would have believed my son.’
Independently, The Choirboy’s father also thought to ask his son whether he had been sexually abused. ‘I wondered what the hell was going on,’ the father said. ‘Was he being molested? Had somebody got to him? I wondered about that.’
When The Choirboy went to live with his father for a time while he was in his late twenties, John finally decided to ask him. His son had been telling him about how he had got into heroin. It had started with ‘chroming’—sniffing paint fumes—with another boy from school (not The Kid) and had moved on to smoking heroin, then to injecting. His father listened with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘And so I asked him. “Has anyone ever made advances to you or touched you?” He said “no”. I found with my son that if you asked the wrong questions, he would be very guarded. For example, if I ever asked him “Are you using drugs?” he would never tell you straight (even though he clearly was using drugs). If you accused him, he would get very upset.
‘So I did not believe him. Because knowing the person that he was before and knowing other boys in this situation through my work, I thought to myself, “this is not the end of it. There’s more to it”.’
The Kid told Mary that her son’s funeral was the breaking point for him. It plunged him into despair and regret. His own mother was very concerned about his wellbeing. He had not been coping since his friend’s death. He decided that he had to come forward, he had to say something. As The Kid told me at the RSL that night I met him, his jaw set, his eyes aflame, insisting that this was ‘about me and it’s about him’. The Kid, with the support of his mum and a victim’s advocate, went to Taskforce SANO.
‘He just couldn’t live with it any more—he had to say something,’ Mary says. She says she ‘liked’ that he did it for her son. But now she and her daughter are left with so many questions, so much fury. She believes The Kid. She can’t think what he possibly has to gain by coming forward. Unlike Monument, Dignan, Scott and, yes, her son, The Kid has not led a chequered life. He’s university-educated, he hasn’t had trouble with the law. He has a lovely young girlfriend, lots of friends, he’s a pillar of his community in a sort of understated, slightly ironic way, and in that part of his life, he is, he told me, very happy. He’s managed, just, to keep it together. He’s been able to compartmentalise. He’s the sort of complainant you’d want as a Victoria Police detective alleging historic crime.
The Choirboy’s father remembers The Kid well, although the only time he has seen him in recent years is at his son’s funeral. The Kid actually stayed with The Choirboy’s family for some weeks when the boys were at St Kevin’s and John remembers a polite and honest young man. ‘Basically, he was a really nice kid.’
The strain of all of this, the enormity of it, means The Kid hangs on by a thread at times—and the thread that held him together enough to make a statement was that Taskforce SANO would arrest George Pell. The Kid was never interested in going on television— he knows that as a sexual assault complainant, the law allows that he never needs to have his identity revealed. He complained because he just wanted justice. Like so many of the other complainants against Pell, The Kid had another run-in with a child abuser. Nazareno Fasciale exposed himself to The Kid when The Kid was still in primary school. The same Father Nazareno Fasciale whose funeral George Pell attended three months before Pell became archbishop.
Mary’s daughter believes The Kid had zero to gain from coming forward if he was not telling the truth. ‘You would not put your family through that, you would not put a dead person’s name through that, you would not put yourself through that,’ she says. ‘Because the emotional toll that would take on you for the rest of your life, knowing that people now know your circumstances, what’s happened to you in your personal life—you wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t true. I believe 100 per cent in my heart what this young fella has come out and said, the allegations that he has made, I 100 per cent support and believe that they are true, because the effects of coming out, they are devastating.’
But The Kid has wrestled with the enormity of reporting to police. Talk to any survivor who has been through the mill with the Catholic Church after accusing a member of the clergy and they’ll tell you she’s right. Months, even years, of anxiety as you wait for the police to act. Legal teams delaying proceedings, demanding severing of trials. Arduous cross-examination where your every word is twisted, your every motivation in life scrutinised. Leaks to newspapers about your past. Your mental health questioned. Your sexuality probed. Your memory tested. And at the end of it all, if the charges are proven, a penalty you think nowhere near fits the crime. As Monument’s lawyer Ingrid Irwin says, if victims knew what they were getting themselves into, many may not bother signing up.
‘Growing up, we are told that clergy are closer to God,’ Irwin’s friend and survivor Andrew Collins says. ‘Who would believe you? We must have been the one who did something wrong. We should just shut up and not speak about it, for the benefit of the Church and so as to not shame our family,’ he says. But he says it’s not just the Catholic guilt that gets you.
‘For men there is the whole thing of not wanting people to know that you were sexually abused by a man, lest you be known as gay if you are straight. Then there are people who just assume that because you were abused that you probably will end up being an abuser yourself … Then if you cope with all of this, and your victim is alive, you might be lucky enough to be able to see your abuser in court. This is an ordeal itself. People would think that clergy would plead guilty and would do all they could to minimise the stress and pain for the victim. But the Church will hire the best lawyers, barristers and even QCs to defend the abusers … The victims are cross-examined as if they are on trial. The victims have to recount every detail of the abuse, and then are called liars.’
The entire thing is played out in public, and even if, Collins says, the victim is not named, they live in fear that they will be found out. He says the Church has traditionally met all the priest’s legal expenses, taken years to defrock him, supported him financially for the rest of his life. By comparison, he says, the victim will face PTSD, depression, anxiety and the impact of the strain on their mental health. ‘If you are eligible for compensation you will probably have received around twenty thousand as total settlement. You will struggle, most likely be alone, and will die around ten years earlier than your peers. Your abuser will have his every need looked after. If we come forward, we are screwed. If we don’t, we struggle to live with ourselves and will probably end up dead, so we are screwed anyway. It appears that it would be better to be the abuser than the victim.’
And lastly, there is the giant elephant in the room. Or the Cardinal, as the case may be. The fact that the allegations are being made about George Pell. The Prince of Ballarat. The denizen of Domus Australia. ‘Imagine having Pell as your abuser,’ Collins muses. ‘A Cardinal. A man who advises the Pope.’ Any accusation, Collins says, ‘will be seen as a lie: You just want fame. Or money.’ This failure to possibly countenance belief that Pell could be anything other than infallible, this prima facie dogged disbelief in the complainants, has already been well-ventilated by some Catholic commentators.
It’s a bleak view but it is one I have heard many times. Mary’s son was, in death, spared that; but like so many survivors, if indeed The Kid spoke the truth, The Choirboy’s own short life became an ordeal of its own. Mary thinks it all falls into place—why her son so suddenly lost all interest in the singing he had loved. Why a cherubic choirboy turned into a taciturn drug user at the age of just fourteen. Why he never managed to kick the habit. ‘These people,’ she says, referring to abusive clergy, ‘destroy lives.’
Her daughter nods in agreement. ‘These people are supposedly someone you look up to. It’s not right, not right at all,’ the daughter says.
Andy Burns and I spent days and days tracking down as many of the choirboys as we could, then I spent a few more days ringing each one individually. None of the dozens of other choirboys I spoke to say that they were ever targeted by Pell. Several in particular were very helpful and said it would not surprise them altogether if he was an abuser. Others said there wasn’t a scintilla of suspicion about him. Just like the Ballarat kids, some found him officious, some found him friendly enough, some were intimidated by his high rank and some don’t remember much about him at all.
A couple suggested the real names of The Kid and The Choirboy as possible people to contact because they had left suddenly. And one noticed a marked change in the behaviour of Mary’s son. But of all of the choirboys I contacted, none of them are at this stage willing to sign themselves up to the ranks of the Pell accusers. And granted, that could well be because, if true, the incident with The Kid and The Choirboy was Pell’s last really spectacular slip-up.
Mary’s daughter says she is overwhelmed by the courage The Kid showed in complaining about such a powerful member of the Church and society. ‘It’s not going to bring my brother back,’ she says, emotionally, ‘but it will help the many people that are out there suffering. Because it’s so brave—it’s a really brave thing to do.’
‘And I like to think in my heart,’ Mary says, ‘this is what [my son] would say too: “This was a friend of mine”.’
‘Absolutely,’ her daughter adds, ‘he would absolutely want to help.’
The Choirboy’s sister becomes tearful as she speaks of the impact that her brother’s life and his loss has had on her three young children. ‘My youngest will never meet his uncle. The two older ones remember their uncle and every night they tell me that they look out that window and they see his star.’ Her mother swallows, her eyes filling, as the daughter continues. ‘They should be able to hold him, and to hug him.’
‘I shouldn’t have lost my son like that,’ Mary says, ‘and nobody else should either. And it’s wrong,’ she says. Her lip quivers. ‘This is something I live with now. This is something that kills me a little bit every day. And it kills me.’
‘We can speak out, though,’ her daughter says, staring at me levelly. ‘Yes, we might not have known at the time, but looking back now, so many things just fit. And so if we can help them [the other complainants] to be sitting here and saying our story, I’m more than happy to be sitting here today and to be doing this. Because nobody should ever have to go through a struggle every day because of what someone did to them. When they were a child.’
‘And even it it’s only one person out of ten that believe us,’ Mary says, ‘well that’s enough.’
Of Pell, they urge anyone else who can come forward to do so. Mary has no great confidence that Victoria Police will get him back to Australia. But she says that one way or the other, she will in some ways always hold the Catholic Church partially responsible for her son’s death. ‘They need to be responsible for that death.’
One of the most senior people in the Australian Catholic Church tells me that Pell has been in battle all his life—he is first and foremost an ideological warrior. ‘It’s life by battle,’ the official says. ‘That’s just how he works psychologically. Division helps him define himself.’ Apart from his battle with the outside world, was Pell also at battle with himself? Was he, like Mick Leahy said to me, ‘actually a very vulnerable person’? I keep coming back to that telling moment he had with Andrew Bolt when Pell admitted to having that fiery temper he suppressed, ever so carefully, with the wooden demeanour. The Easter Island statue of a man gliding through the cathedral, papering over emotion, lest he snap. Lest he flatten someone, verbally or physically, like he did on the football field. If there is truth in what happened to Phil Scott, Lyndon Monument, Damian Dignan, Michael Breen, The Kid and The Choirboy (not to mention the other complainants to police I know of—in instances that are both alleged to have occurred in 1970s Ballarat—and, perhaps, those that I don’t as I am not privy to the police file), were these snaps? If true, the picture of offending it paints is opportunistic, fleeting, transitory. There is none of the usual ‘rock spider’ grooming. No talk of ‘our little secret’, no carefully planned trips to the countryside, no creepily tender stroking of hair. It’s just quick, aggressive; it has the victim second-guessing themselves as it came from nowhere. Did that really happen? Did he just do that? Maybe it’s just me?
As has always been my journalistic practice, I sent a list of questions to the Cardinal in early 2017 about the key allegations against him contained in this book. It was sent through his longstanding media advisor, Katrina Lee. Ms Lee did not respond, and when I chased her up, she finally replied that the matter was being handled by the Cardinal’s solicitors and I should expect to hear from them. A series of legal letters ensued in which Pell, through Corrs Chambers Westgarth, declined to answer any of the questions without having access to information including, but not limited to, full police statements, unedited recordings of interviews, full names of complainants, direct quotes from the book. In two decades in journalism, I have never had a single person, organisation or corporation make such onerous requests. Legal correspondence from my publisher, Melbourne University Publishing, said even heads of state and captains of industry had not had the same difficulties George Pell had with providing responses to a written list of questions.
So beyond the statements he released after the 7.30 story I have already flagged and his general assertion that he has never abused anyone, anywhere and he believes that publishing these allegations represents, to him, a grave injustice, it is unclear what George Pell’s position is in relation to the allegations contained in this book as he declines to put it on the record. His solicitors say in one of the letters that ‘previous allegations against the Cardinal … have either been disproven, or are so vague that the benefit of the doubt may be given to Cardinal Pell’. It is unclear what this means. At the time of writing, the Royal Commission has still not delivered its final report into his evidence in the Ballarat and Melbourne case studies. Counsel Assisting, Gail Furness, SC, made a number of adverse recommendations about his evidence in her final submissions. In the Southwell Inquiry, Justice Southwell did not find against the Cardinal, but, crucially, believed his accuser, Phil Scott, as well as George Pell.
And of course, at the time of writing, the police investigation into the Cardinal continues.
If Victoria Police get their man, the process will be long and arduous. As, effectively, Treasurer for the Vatican, he is entitled to the presumption of diplomatic immunity. Australian law has an exemption to diplomatic immunity for personal injury and Pell does not actually live in the Vatican, but Italy—which does have an extradition treaty—but it’s complicated. At the time of writing, he’s seventy-six. How long before he reaches ‘I don’t recall’ territory? Undoubtedly, even if he comes back, if a criminal trial proceeds, it will be delayed by whatever legal processes the finest silks can employ.
But regardless of whether the criminal justice system delivers the result that these men desperately want, the worm is turning for Pell and the Catholic Church. In February 2017, in the wake of the Royal Commission publishing its report on the astonishing extent of abuse in the Catholic Church, Greens senator Rachel Siewert put a motion to the Australian Senate acknowledging the numbers and calling on ‘Cardinal George Pell to return to Australia to assist the Victorian Police and the Office of Public Prosecutions with their investigations into these matters’. Much to Pell’s chagrin, the motion was passed by the Senate. At the time, a spokesperson for him called it a ‘political stunt’ and ‘pathetic political point-scoring’. Six weeks later, the Cardinal wrote a letter, which was tabled in parliament, hitting back at the Senate:
The use of parliamentary privilege to attack me on this basis is both extraordinary and unjust. Given that the investigation is ongoing, any calls from the Senate for my return to Australia can only be perceived as an interference on the part of the Senate in the due process of the Victoria Police investigation … Any fair-minded person would conclude that I have made every effort to be available to the Royal Commission and to Victoria Police to assist with their inquiries.
While the Senate motion may have had no real force and thus has the whiff of a stunt, it undoubtedly represents a wider zeitgeist against Pell. The tide of history is washing away from the Pell conception of the faith.
In the Australian Church, the winds of change are furiously blowing through. The staggering statistics heard in the Royal Commission, which brought the Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council CEO Francis Sullivan to tears, have left the clergy and the flock smarting. There is a clear sense that many are moving away from Pell’s rigid form of Catholicism. For those numbers show that it has failed them utterly. A staggering 7 per cent of priests, largely formed in the monastic seminaries that Pell wanted to return to, were accused of abusing children. 4444 people have alleged that they were victims. Certainly more than just poor Emma Foster. The fact that the tribe has protected itself, at the expense of little kids, is now exposed.
The language of Pell—‘we object to being described as the “only cab on the rank”’; ‘it’s a sad story and it wasn’t much interest to me’—has disappeared. The language is now bruised and contrite. ‘These numbers are shocking, they are tragic and they are indefensible,’ said Sullivan, struggling to form the words as he delivered an address to the Royal Commission.
‘As Catholics, we hang our heads in shame,’ the man who had been Pell’s protégé, Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, said in a slightly more scripted YouTube message. Giving evidence to the Commission with archbishops from around the country in February 2017, he described the Church’s response as a ‘kind of criminal negligence to deal with the problems that were staring us in the face’. The public gallery applauded. His contemporaries used similarly damning language: Archbishop of Perth Timothy Costelloe described a ‘catastrophic failure’ in leadership, with the Holy See seeing itself as ‘so special, so unique and so important’ that it was untouchable. ‘That’s probably the way many bishops in their own dioceses might also think of themselves—as a law unto themselves, as not having to be answerable to anybody, as not having to consult with anybody as to being able to make decisions just out of their own wisdom.’
Survivors can only hope that the words aren’t as hollow as all the holy lectures they received as children, all the while that they were being raped in presbyteries, touched up in confessionals. Eileen Piper, who met Denis Hart with a box full of 50 000 signatures asking him to finally give her an apology over how she was treated after her daughter Stephanie’s death, certainly felt so. Rather than making any admissions or saying sorry, Hart offered to pray with Eileen. She declined that offer. As the lawyer representing many of the child abuse victims Viv Waller confirmed, at the same that these new apologies from Church officials were being conveyed, in Melbourne, some pretty extraordinary stuff was still carrying on. The Melbourne Response had increased the cap for compensation to $150 000; meaning that survivors could apply to get a top-up of their original payments, which were generally very low. The amount they had already received was being adjusted for inflation in favour of the Church. So for example, if the initial payment in 2009 was $75 000, in 2017 it would be treated as almost $90 000 and they would lose the increased value of their original payment.
‘A few crocodile tears from Church officials—well I can tell you, it’s not much different at the coalface,’ Waller told ABC radio’s Jon Faine. As Eileen’s lawyer, Judy Courtin, wrote in The Age: ‘whilst feigning compassion, this hierarchy is nervously propelling unknown millions of dollars at lawyers to help them defend the indefensible and to conceal the truth’. Courtin, like Waller, is weary. ‘The inhumanity and utter ruthlessness of these hypocritical men of God makes me sick,’ Courtin said.
Despite this, the most important bellwether comes in the form of a charismatic Argentinian octogenarian Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. When Bergoglio was elected as the 266th Pontiff in 2013, he was the first Pope since the eighth century from outside of Europe. It is rumoured Pell was campaigning for another, conservative, cardinal—Angelo Scola of Milan—and a theologically rigid coterie of cardinals was most displeased with the choice of Francis.
The people who say they are Pell’s victims had hoped that Pope Francis might admonish Pell, might support them, after the story first broke. That did not happen. The Pope wishes to wait until a court finds Pell guilty before he rushes to judgement.
But it is true to say that Pope Francis has set about quietly and deliberately sidelining Pell’s faction of the Church. Arch-conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke has been particularly in the Pope’s sights. Burke, who has called on Catholics to brace for martyrdom to defend the ‘traditional’ family, has been demoted from several senior posts. Pope Francis also ousted Pell, Burke and the conservative Canadian Cardinal Prelate Marc Ouellet from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Four of the old guard, including Burke, sent a letter to Pope Francis known as a dubia questioning the papal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, The Joy of Love, which has in some quarters been interpreted as opening the door to divorced Catholics receiving communion. Pope Francis was unperturbed.
Pell, who was appointed by Pope Francis to the Secretariat for the Economy in the Vatican in 2014, had been making sweeping changes such as bringing in the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to overhaul Rome’s books. But in 2016, the Pope cancelled the audit and removed a number of Pell’s powers. There is much debate in Catholic journals about whether this is simply bloody-minded Italians resisting the forthright Australian Cardinal’s changes, or whether it is that Pope Francis doesn’t like Pell’s take-no-prisoners style. Either way, the Cardinal’s wings have been seriously clipped.
Pope Francis is an entirely different sort of leader to Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II before him. He frequently warns of the perils of theological rigidity in the Catholic Church. In a homily in October 2016, he said those who unbendingly followed the law of God were in need of God’s help. ‘The Law was not drawn up to enslave us but to set us free, to make us God’s children,’ he said. ‘Behind an attitude of rigidity there is always something else in the life of a person. Rigidity is not a gift of God. Meekness is; goodness is; benevolence is; forgiveness is.’ He even went so far as to say that rigidity concealed a ‘double life’ and a ‘sickness’. ‘They appear good because they follow the Law; but behind there is something that does not make them good. Either they’re bad, hypocrites or they are sick. They suffer!’ he said. Much of this is a direct challenge to Pell’s faction in Rome.
Pope Francis will not heal some of the old wounds of the Church. He will not, for instance, bring back Bishop Bill Morris, sacked by Pope Benedict for daring to question the old, alienating ways. I say to Morris that he must feel extraordinarily cynical, especially in light of the many Catholic priests who had been protected after they abused children, or as bishops covered up that abuse and allowed it to keep flourishing.
‘They call me a cockeyed optimist,’ Morris says with a chuckle. ‘But the thing is, Louise, out of the ashes comes new life. Something has to die for new life to come forward. People are just not going to take the garbage they did from us before. We bishops have let people down and we need to give people a voice. We have let our own people down.
‘I can cry over that, but I am also enthusiastic about the fact that there is a whole new mission we are on about. It’s about getting the relationships right. If you understand that we hold those beating hearts in our hands, the Church is going to change. We have been good at power, good at dictating the way people act. But we have not been good at relationships. We have protected our power and destroyed our relationships.’
Paul Connell, the theologian who Pell removed as Rector of Corpus Christi, tells me change takes time in Rome. It’s fifty years since the Second Vatican Council and, Connell says, over centuries it has often taken longer than that for a council of the bishops to be fully accepted into the worldwide Church. After a half-century of divisions and revisions and resistance—a battle of whether to retreat, or to move forward into the light—along has come Pope Francis. ‘Francis is an extraordinary phenomenon,’ Connell says, ‘and if you have faith, you have to believe the Holy Spirit is working here. Because Francis is what the Church needs.’
None of this will bring happiness, employment, mental health or sobriety to a small group of men who say that George Pell abused their bodies and their trust. They’ll have to find their own ways to claw those back. It won’t erase the story of their childhood that they say plays in their minds every day, like a rickety old super 8, spinning. There are no easy happy endings in this narrative, scant prospect of swift justice. The best they can hope for is that the truth can be known. As Peter Blenkiron always says to me, ‘Truth is the child of time, Louise. Truth is the child of time.’