AUSTRALIA
Green Left Weekly
PHIL SHANNON
Friday, July 7, 2017
Cardinal: The Rise & Fall of George Pell
Louise Milligan
Melbourne University Press, 2017
384 pages
The Vatican Treasurer, George Pell, could turn out to be the Lance Armstrong of the Australian Catholic Church.
Like Armstrong, the world’s former top cyclist who furiously denied being a drug cheat until he was eventually rumbled by dogged investigative journalists. Pell, Australia’s top Catholic, has maintained his innocence in the face of mounting allegations that he covered up an epidemic of sexual abuse of children by Australian Catholic priests.
He has now been charged with such crimes himself.
The ABC’s Louise Milligan has been on Pell’s case for a while now. Her new book, Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell, zeroes in on the fire causing all the smoke surrounding Pell.
Pell, born in Ballarat in 1941, rose through Catholic seminaries and presbyteries, which were hotspots for turning out paedophile priests. He became Archbishop of Melbourne and then, in 2014, the Vatican’s number 2 in Rome. But Pell left a ruinous path of personal destruction (depression, substance abuse, suicide) in his holy wake.
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.