Child Sex Abuse Claims against George Pell Explored by Louise Milligan
By Gerard Windsor
Two confessions. First, I’m a practising, albeit sinful, Catholic. Second, I’ve crossed swords, in print, with George Pell. So, is the lengthening charge sheet against the cardinal merely a vast smear campaign? In particular, is it one fuelled by a fierce antipathy to religion, to Christianity, and especially to Catholicism? Certainly there is a stark contemporary context for this public indictment. By virtue of his status as a cardinal, his uncompromising personality and his position in the Vatican, Pell is perceived as the representative Australian Catholic. And that too at a time when the Catholic Church is seen as the major obstacle to a raft of proposed liberal social reforms: euthanasia bills before the NSW and Victorian parliaments, an abortion liberalisation bill in NSW, and the nationwide marriage equality debate. The logic is obvious: discredit Pell and you discredit Catholic opinion on these issues. It’s a knockout blow. Certainly we are seeing widespread expressions of the feeling that the Catholic Church has lost any right to be dictating, or even joining a discussion, on moral issues. There are secular zealots barracking shrilly as each new nail is hammered into the Pell coffin. And you know that it’s not simply justice they’re after. Where then does that leave the motivation and practice of anyone who is involved in putting together that charge sheet? Louise Milligan’s Cardinal is a very extensive outgrowth of a program that she did for ABC TV’s 7.30 last year. The book is carefully presented; the reader is immediately nudged towards an impression that Milligan is, let’s say, no David Marr. She’s an insider and can think warmly of Catholics. So the blurb ends, ‘‘Milligan is Irish-born and was raised a devoted Catholic.’’ More seductive — not least because we come to believe it is so heartfelt — is the book’s dedication: ‘‘For my Dad, a fine man and a believer.’’ So, although we expect a 384-page hatchet job, we wonder if we’re just being lulled by this preliminary softening-up. Or is it all more nuanced than that? I can only say that Milligan increasingly wins my confidence. For a start, she’s fond of the phrase ‘‘To be fair to ... ’’, and it’s used to admit that other circumstances need to be taken into account, that she’s willing to allow the defence to make its point. There’s both a fair-mindedness and a range of empathy, even compassion, on display here. So, for example, when Pell was accused in 2002 of having molested a boy, Phil Scott, in 1961, John Howard and Tony Abbott sprang to Pell’s defence. Milligan comments that they did so before they knew any details of the case. Then she says, ‘‘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.’’ Elsewhere she happily quotes one survivor who says, ‘‘Pell has become a lightning rod to which people attach their anger — sometimes without real justification. It’s like a pantomime where they want to boo and hiss when he comes on stage.’’ Virtually all her witnesses are for the prosecution, but she’s ready to sketch out a character in each case and not touch them up for credibility purposes. One unusual aside is an analysis of Melbourne’s colourful priest Father Bob Maguire after he tells her that priests are ‘‘crystallised in adolescence ... We haven’t had mature adult relationships.’’ Milligan reflects: 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. Combine this perceptiveness and openness with the requisite virtues of the investigative journalist — tirelessly digging out and following up sources, a manner that informants trust and open up to, checking and rechecking, an ultra-hygienic care not to cross-contaminate the evidence of different witnesses — and a reader is ready to give general credence to Milligan’s story. She attacks — and there’s no denying it is an attack — on a very broad front. She canvasses three cases of alleged abuse allegedly perpetrated by Pell. Her fourth charge is that he could not possibly not have known of priest abusers, particularly during the years he spent in Ballarat. Next he is alleged to have been a fixer, almost a standover man, warning off would-be complainants. Finally, he has always claimed that he was the first to take steps to set up an ecclesiastical appeals system for victims, what he named the Melbourne Response, whereas, Milligan says, he ran roughshod over a prior and more humane system, Towards Healing, being formulated by his brother bishops as a group. The abuses attributed to Pell, now 75, are said to have occurred in 1961, the late 1970s and in 1997. When he was 20 he was alleged to have put his hands down the pants of 12-year-old Phil Scott. The Victorian government set up an inquiry into this, but retired Supreme Court judge Alec Southwell QC found that both the complainant and Pell seemed to be truthful witnesses, so he had to find that the complaint had not been established. Although Pell has always claimed he was exonerated, the result was really a draw. Secondly, a large number of boys have claimed that Pell groped them regularly in the Eureka Pool at Ballarat in the 70s, and that he had a habit of standing naked in the dressing shed for a long time while he talked to groups of them. A similar accusation has been made about a later period, when Pell was an annual regular at the Torquay Surf Club. Finally, one former choirboy said he and a companion (now dead of a heroin overdose) were made to perform oral sex in St Patrick’s Cathedral. The jury, as they say, is still out on all these accusations. Individual stories have their puzzling, even questionable elements. Two boys at the same time in a room in his own cathedral? How easily does one ‘‘walk past the open door of the presbytery’’ and see ‘‘the aftermath of a rape’’? If you’re throwing boys into the air in a pool, is it easy to make sure your hands touch only non-private parts of their bodies? Milligan trawls such a wide area. Accumulation and breadth is where the power of this book lies. For example, priests A and B and C can be shown to have known of Gerald Ridsdale’s abusing, but Pell had the same official authority that they had, and more personal authority, so the likelihood that he also knew is extreme. Pell says priests don’t gossip, but Milligan’s copious conversations with the clergy tell her that’s not true. In the second half of the book an animus against Pell starts to show, above all in Milligan’s ironic commentary on his statements to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Yet I doubt that she is a good hater; she readily acknowledges goodness wherever she finds it, not least in the church. Her forensic skills are combined with a gentle, sympathetic understanding of the survivors, the dead (not least the suicides) and their families. She is acute and direct on, for example, the lifelong effects of sexual abuse — not least the frequency with which so many victims fell into substance abuse and crime, and hence the naked vulnerability of such CVs to skilful defence lawyers. So many have difficulty in speaking about their abuse, above all in court, where their appearances can involve running an especially cruel gauntlet. For Pell, recent years could only have been grim. The searchlights on him seem to have been so intense that this reader can’t avoid hearing Hamlet’s tolling reminder, ‘‘… and who should ’scape whipping?’’ Yet if what Milligan argues is largely or wholly untrue, it could only be because of massive delusion or a widespread malevolent conspiracy. If Pell is guilty of nothing more than memory losses and faux pas before the royal commission, we’re forced to conclude that human capacity for co-ordinated mischievous lying is infinite. Hence, to invoke that great logical trope of scholastic philosophy, Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is always to be preferred. I have no idea about the legal strength of a prosecution case, but as a Catholic leader, arbiter and model, George Pell has no future at all. There is an enormity about this book. Have we ever previously had such a damning character vivisection of a public figure? Not of a person hitherto ‘‘known to police’’ or a ‘‘colourful identity’’, but rather of a man whose life and career has ostensibly been dedicated to the service and imitation of a figure whose message was disempowerment and selfless love. Gerard Windsor’s new book is The Tempest-Tossed Church: Being a Catholic Today. Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell By Louise Milligan
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