[Book Review] The cardinal, the courts and the controversies

AUSTRALIA
The Age

September 4, 2020

By Barney Zwartz

The Case of George Pell: Reckoning with Child Sexual Abuse by Clergy, by Melissa Davey,
Scribe, $35

This is a book of mixed merits, good in parts but requiring perseverance to reach them through tediously exhaustive accounts of Cardinal George Pell’s progress through the justice system on historical sexual abuse charges. Guardian reporter Melissa Davey takes us through the committal, mistrial, retrial, unsuccessful Supreme Court appeal and High Court acquittal.

Cardinal George Pell arrives at the Melbourne County Court for sentencing in February 2019. His conviction was later overturned on appeal by the High Court of Australia.
Cardinal George Pell arrives at the Melbourne County Court for sentencing in February 2019. His conviction was later overturned on appeal by the High Court of Australia.CREDIT:JASON SOUTH

It would have helped readers if Davey had set out what she was trying to achieve at the start. She does not do so until page 391, at the end of the book. There she says that, so far as she knows, she is the only journalist who covered the Royal Commission and all Pell’s trials and she wants readers to have the evidence, as much as possible, before they leap to judgment about his guilt or innocence – a matter on which she wisely gives no opinion. And she wants to set it in the context of wider research into child sexual abuse.

She certainly succeeds in the first aim, and up to a point in the second which, given how deeply the trials are etched into the public record, strikes me as the more important. I would have liked more on this and less of the evidence because, although Davey cites some interesting research, it comes across as a little perfunctory. In the hands of someone like the vastly more experienced David Marr, who has also written extensively on Pell for The Guardian and elsewhere, deeper questions might have been explored more widely.

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