SOUTH AFRICA
Daily Maverick
Things got tough in Rome last week. First, on Thursday, Australian police in the state of Victoria announced that they have filed sex abuse charges against Cardinal George Pell. Pell was moved from Sydney to Rome by Pope Francis in 2014 to spearhead his reform of the Vatican’s financial system. Then, on Saturday, to the dismay of many conservative Catholics, Pope Francis decided not to renew the appointment of the church’s chief doctrinal official. German Cardinal, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to head up that office just before he decided to quit in 2013. Both moves have implications for Pope Francis’ project of reform.
BY RUSSELL POLLITT.
George Pell is no stranger to controversy. He is known to be ambitious, bombastic, overbearing and combative. Pell could be accused of many things; being timid is not one of them. When Pell was an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne, he was appointed to be an adviser to the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) who was the Church’s chief doctrinal enforcer. Pell was very much of the mindset of Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II. Theologically conservative and authoritarian, he supported many of the moves by John Paul II to wind back the reforms of the church’s Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
To his admirers Pell is solid, orthodox (whatever that means in contemporary Catholicism) and courageous. His supporters believe that he is a man who dares to stand on the side of truth in a world of moral relativism. When he was Archbishop of Melbourne, and later Sydney, he provided an energetic and strident voice attempting to restore clerical authority and the orthodox Catholic voice on social issues. Pell was seen, by some, as the one who would “rescue” the church from progressives and restore it to “orthodoxy”.
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