Cleaning up the post-George Pell parish in Sydney

AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

April 2, 2014

Elizabeth Farrelly
Sydney Morning Herald columnist, author, architecture critic and essayist

George Pell wants to insure priests against being sued for child sexual abuse. My head is still rotating on its axis. Our man in purple, our alpha priest, moral paragon. Our Vatican princeling, just days from taking up his dauphindom in Rome: he said that? He dropped this fissile solipsism on our public debate and left, smacking the dust from his hands like, we’re done now, right?

For this was no dinner party throw-away. The cardinal – fully frocked, schooled and premeditated – breathed his proposition into the stone tablets of a royal commission. He wanted it recorded and kept. Forever.

But insurance? Does he think child sex is some unavoidable occupational hazard? Something a priest will sooner or later fall to? An accident? If you wanted to maximise the damage already done to countless children, you’d be hard put to find a surer way, or crueller.

It was already accepted that the church had systematically preyed on its charges, breaking their still-soft hearts by telling them not just to take it and be quiet, but that this – this! – is how God loves them.

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