The late cardinal George Pell is either nowhere at all, or somewhere on Parnassus, puffing his way up Purgatory. The hope expressed by many progressives that he hath descended unto hell is in basic error. It seems highly unlikely that Pell would have rejected God prior to the operation whose complications he perished from, or have committed a mortal sin not shriven during or after the operation. For whatever he has done in his life, he must pay the price midway between hell and heaven, before he enters the latter by the grace of God. Or absolutely nothing happens to him at all ever again.
Whatever the case, his presence will not be leaving this earth any time soon. In death, as in life, Pell is too important to both sides of the great progressive v “the right” social war, to be let go of just yet.
The tributes paid to him by the latter have been ridiculous, just utterly absurd, constructing this ruthless Vatican fixer and lifelong politician as some sort of humble priest, floating along in a state of grace, exuding the calm and serenity offered by his faith.
Ha. If there was ever anyone less graceful as a public figure than George Pell, let them come forward. Pell was an old-fashioned Catholic bruiser, come out of the RC heartland of central Victoria in the 1950s, which is like coming here from the 19th century. He was certain of the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, and thus the unique truth of Christianity — and his church’s version of it in particular.
Having got a meat-and-potatoes faith from his family, he showed no inclination to reflect on it publicly, even as such belief became increasingly intellectually absurd. But nor did he want to be publicly identified as a Jesus man, prating about our Lord. He put his abilities into politics and organisation at a state, national and then global (I guess, cosmic) level, to the church’s advantage and to Pell’s personal gain, in power and prestige. Any honest supporter of his would acknowledge that, rather than suggest that this jowly Vatican hard man was some sort of elfin sprite of blah blah blah.
Pell didn’t do much public whining about the year and more he spent in jail on a conviction quashed 7-0, still less the ridiculous and unGodly comparisons with Jesus’ ordeal that Tony Abbott is making, not because he was humbled and circumspect concerning his other sins regarding sexual abuse in the church, but because he didn’t want anything, anything, to dim the lustre of that power. He was on his way back to the Vatican the moment they were processing him out the prison gate.
Politically and organisationally, he has unquestionably strengthened the church, here and globally. He was the numbers man in the election of Pope Benedict, bouncing ’round Rome for weeks stitching factions together, seeing the council as no more than an extension of the NSW right. Thereafter he was given enormous power to try to break the church’s deep state within its tangled and chaotic financial institutions. Since Vatican finances had been the cause of possible murder in the 1970s, just preceding the surprise death of John Paul I a month after his election, it was not without risk, and it is not impossible that such a role was not unconnected with the sudden return of child sex abuse allegations from out of the past.
But whatever his organisational successes, Pell’s muscular conservatism, his apparent conviction that the church really had nothing to apologise for, or deeply scrutinise itself over, was clearly a disaster for the spread and success of Roman Catholicism in Australia. The faith could have become identified with a figure like Father Bob McGuire, as relentless fighters for the oppressed, the beating heart of a heartless world. In doing so, it could have won people over, without having to surrender on abortion or the rainbow agenda.
Instead, Roman Catholicism in Australia has become identified with its Mary mafia faction, the most power-obsessed, arrogant, self-satisfied and cynical side of the church, which ran from Pell to the editorial section of The Australian to the Sydney Institute (“cultural Catholics”) and back again.
Even before Pell became publicly associated with abuse cover-ups and the heavying of victims and complainants, he gave the impression that the church was about anything other than love, an appearance reinforced by the op-ed Spenglerism of Paul Kelly, the neurotic self-pity of Abbott, and the manic ravings of Greg Sheridan, whose incurious, unresponsive religiosity is simply a desperate desire for a simple framework to give meaning in the flux of the world — a self-hypnosis act, complete with angels, Marian visions and the rest. Who the hell would want that? The evangelists and Pentecostals have rock music, and tell you something in the universe loves you. Whose churches are crowded aircraft hangars, and whose are being converted into Thai restaurants?
But it was with the exposure of widespread sexual abuse, the churchwide cover-up, and the lack of any sign of deep reflection by the church, that many Australians, including young ones, in a new postmodern, post-secular environment, really wrote them off as anything other than a mafia with hymns and a land portfolio.
Here the church was caught in a shift of the historical plates that threatened to crush it altogether. When the sexual abuse scandals began to emerge in the 1970s, it was not only because the era had become one of questioning power. It was because it was one in which sexual being had become central to the idea of a fully lived life.
Previously, within Christianity, you wanted sex, maybe, and maybe you got it. If you didn’t — if a marriage was sexless or mismatched, or inceldom for man or woman occurred — it was a disappointment, maybe even a major one. But it didn’t annihilate you as a person. But in the 1960s, after a century that turned back to the sensual and particular, Bloomsbury, Freud, Reich, Anais Nin, Helen Gurley Brown and more, sex became the sacrament the church had previously offered, the way to ecstatic being, fusion of body, soul and love — and on its own terms, not as a component of procreation and the cosmic architecture that employed.
So, in a manner that would simply not have been recognised by many before the late 1950s, sexual abuse of children, in ruining sex for the adults they grew into, came to be understood as a form of soul murder. Abusive priests used the cover of the sun through stained glass and transcendent music to make a hell in heaven’s despite. And they made it in the soul, and the marrow, of each man or woman who suffered it as boy and girl, and could never subsequently defeat it.
Pell’s Australian Catholic Church has never been able to fully acknowledge the full character of what it has done, because to do so would be to admit that the post-’60s secular-pagan version of life, with the centrality of sex, has won, and is now seen as a truer picture of what the world is. Nothing the church offers by way of an alternative encounter with being and the universe seems to be any sort of sufficient consolation.
Had the church understood, really understood, at the institutional level, the real horror of what it had done, it would have had some sort of global near-collapse, which would have been a step on the way to its own salvation. Instead, the incomprehension of its wrong opened it to pursue the ends of power, by all means necessary — the massive, coordinated and organised cover-ups and movements, which allowed paedophile priests to remain active for decades at a time.
With this, the Roman Catholic Church tipped into radical evil. The methods of movement and cover-up were simply a repurposing of methods already developed for the rescue of Nazis, through the “ratlines” operated at the end of World War II, to smuggle them to South America and the Arab world. With the fusion of these two purposes in a continuous practice, we can go beyond mere sociological and political categories to say that post-WWII the Roman Catholic Church — or large and powerful sections of it — was essentially satanic. They were agents of the adversary to all life and love, a portal for the bringing of despair into the world.
It is arguable that the only possible moral act of those in the Roman Catholic Church in these years would have been to seek to destroy the church in its own name, in order for it to re-emerge in a wholly changed form. Christianity, arguably, emerged as an answer to the spreading death cult of Rome. A similarly rupturing act may have been necessary.
Pell and people of his ilk were not the types to do that. But in their desperate attempt to save the church as a worldly institution, they may have hurried it on to very rapid decline in a place like Australia.
Let’s stipulate that Roman Catholicism is not going to wink out of existence in Honduras, Galway or Palermo. But here? There’s a limit to how far active attendance can fall before a reversal occurs and the hallowed spaces of cathedral and church see their majesty become self-parody, words echoing in empty stone. That’s not something I wish for it, but it’s a future it’s Blundstone Borgia made more, not less, likely.
But if Pell was left battered and discredited, there was something at the end that gave him a final possibility of a sort of late grace. That was progressives, and their determination to turn the horrors arising from his prosecution into cheap fodder for culture-war victory. This backfired utterly.
Whatever one thought of Pell, it should have been obvious that the sexual assault and rape case against him was wobbly, that the jury might have been swayed by the spirit of the era, and that the verdict might be reversed on appeal. Yet Pell’s lower court conviction became the occasion for an orgy of self-congratulation by progressives, including many on the political left who found faith at last in the previously much-criticised, creakingly unreformed Anglo-Saxon adversarial criminal justice system.
Suddenly, the appeals system, hitherto relied on to have some degree of protection for the railroaded, was a power structure, and a newfound maoisant regard for the jury above all — people’s justice! — took over. The unanimous High Court appeal result made that ridiculous.
Progressivism showed in this sad episode not the moral strength of humanism as regards religious mystification, but its utter weakness as a movement, relying for victory on the jailing of one noisy enemy. When that was reversed, Pell’s conduct post-release appeared to many to be humble, un-self-pitying and anything but vindictive, an impression gained even by those in no real doubt that he was a systemic paedophile facilitator.
In this strange saga on this near-godless desert continent, by the back-hand of providence, to George Pell, whether he is somewhere or nowhere at all, there is grace abounding to the last of sinners.
Survivors of abuse can find support by calling Bravehearts at 1800 272 831 or the Blue Knot Foundation at 1300 657 380. The Kids Helpline is 1800 55 1800.
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au.
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636. In an emergency, call 000.
