Cardinal Pell Holds His Head up High As He Cleans up Vatican Finances

By Angela Shanahan
The Australian
September 23, 2016

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During the past 15 years almost no public figure in Australia has been subjected to the amount of abuse, vilification and downright hate as Cardinal George Pell. This has ranged from smears about lack of action on sexual abuse by clergy to vague innuendo about his own behaviour and flimsy allegations about impropriety while play-fighting in a pool and changing in the dressing sheds, which, frankly, verge on the ridiculous. Ask anyone what they think about the cardinal and you will get responses on a spectrum from villain to hero.

I had lunch with Pell in his apartment in Rome in July. It was not the first time I had met him, but it was the first time I had a prolonged conversation with him.

He lives in a quiet block comfortably furnished in clerical style and the lunch was prepared and served by a sharp young American nun who, much to everyone’s astonishment, had attended the West Point military academy.

Conversation moved from the cardinal’s work at the Vatican to the scandals destroying his character in Australia. Although he seemed pessimistic about his financial reforms, he was in a very relaxed mood and — oddly, considering what is happening here — much more generally good-­humoured than I had expected. Many people close to Pell are confident that the latest accusations being investigated by Victoria Police, arising from complaints about Pell’s time in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne, will simply fade away.

Pell is not a man to be destroyed easily. Time and again, from the beginning of his archbishopric in Sydney, enemies of the church have focused on the cardinal as the personification of wrongdoing — as in David Marr’s Quarterly Essay The Prince, a simplistic way of trying to further destabilise and disenfranchise the confused laity, most of whom don’t identify as reactionaries or conservatives.