AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times
November 17, 2012
Jack Waterford
Julia Gillard’s decision to go for a royal commission into institutional sex abuse of children may have involved a calculation that it had more capacity to hurt the other side of politics than her own. That might be summarised with the observations that Australia’s most visible Catholic, George Cardinal Pell, is a close friend, mentor and counsellor of the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, and no one can remember Pell wittingly doing Labor a favour – at least since 1955 – or missing an opportunity to benefit the Coalition.
Pell is not, of course, a sexual abuser of children, nor any sort of apologist for it. Nor is Abbott. But Pell’s embattled, defensive and sometimes angry reaction to criticism of the church’s response to the epidemic of child abuse – including his suggestion this week that the media were beating up on the church – could hardly have better symbolised a common suspicion that the leadership of the church was slow to act once it realised it had a big problem, failed to reach out properly to victims, and in certain respects still fails to ”get it”. Pell, when on the front foot on this subject, as opposed to Catholic issues he would prefer to be talking about, is a public relations disaster for the church.
And, some tacticians might think, the well-known reluctance of Pell to take a backward step or a back seat when under attack might accentuate the disaster at times in the political cycle when it matters. The Catholic Church may have a lot of adherents, even generally loyal ones, but it has only limited moral capital in the bank, and expending it on defending the indefensible is pretty dumb.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.