AUSTRALIA
BRW
Leo D’Angelo Fisher Columnist
Cardinal George Pell is Australia’s most senior Catholic, but he rejects the assertion that he is the head of the Catholic Church in Australia. At his marathon four-and-a-half-hour appearance before the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse on Monday, Pell admitted to many things, but he did not agree that the buck for systemic abuse of children by Catholic priests stopped with him.
“I’m not the Catholic Prime Minister of Australia. I am not the general manager Australia. The Catholic Church is. . . a very interesting example of a flat organisation,” he told the at times openly-hostile inquiry.
It may well be an organisational nicety of the Catholic Church hierarchy that Pell does not carry the title “chief executive officer, Catholic Church Australia Ltd” on his business card, but nobody was under the illusion that Pell was not speaking for the church as the titular, if not actual, head of the church in Australia.
When Pell told the inquiry, “I’m fully apologetic and absolutely sorry” and admitted “that lives have been blighted”, that “these crimes have contributed to too many suicides”, and that priests who had abused children in their care had been deliberately moved from parish to parish, and that “in some cases, unfortunately” paedophile priests were placed above the law – these were not the admissions of a mere parish priest. The weight of these shocking admissions about the church’s failings came from the authority of Pell’s leadership of the church.
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