George Pell profile: the pope’s Australian hardman faces the fight of his life

AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

David Marr
Thursday 29 June 2017

A bright kid from an Australian bush town, George Pell kept his nose clean as he rose through the ranks to become chief of the Vatican’s finances. Despite a notably hard heart he was always a valuable asset to the church as a fearless conservative ideologue and a fine administrator.

Young Pell was plucked from Australia to train in Rome and at Oxford for the big career that was always beckoning. He returned to serve briefly and unhappily in a remote parish on the Murray before being brought into the heart of the diocese of Ballarat which in those years was a hell of child abuse.

Pell swears he saw little or nothing in those years.

Strange that the career of a man who would climb so far and so fast was marked early on by such a want of curiosity. He would explain to Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse: “It was a sad story and of not much interest to me.”

He sat on a committee that transferred Father Gerard Ridsdale from parish to parish. The crimes of this vicious paedophile were notorious in Ballarat, known to the bishop and familiar to other members of the committee. But by his own account, Pell never asked why this priest was always on the move.

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