Pell’s great test of faith

AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph

DOUG CONWAY, AAP SENIOR CORRESPONDENT AAP MAY 30, 2013

GOD chose George Pell before Richmond Football Club could. But is the former ruckman now a religious tiger who has been forced to change his stripes a little?

Australia’s most senior Catholic churchman had a professional Aussie Rules contract in his bag in his last year at school.

He was also toying with life as a lawyer or doctor.

But faith inexorably pulled him away, and instead the 18-year-old country boy from Ballarat entered Melbourne’s Corpus Christi Seminary in 1960.

“I had fought against it for a long time,” he once said. “But I suspected and became convinced that God was calling me to do his work. I’ve never regretted it, though I still marvel that I made the leap and gave it a go.”

Cardinal Pell’s faith must have been sorely tested as he confronted perhaps the most pernicious evil lurking beneath the surface of Australian society for decades – the sexual abuse of children by priests in his church, including one he had shared a residence with.

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