AUSTRALIA
Courier-Mail
Opinion: Cardinal George Pell’s mean spirit in dealings with child abuse victims lives on after his transfer to Rome
TERRY SWEETMAN THE COURIER-MAIL AUGUST 15, 2014
THE Catholic Church has moved another embarrassing priest to a new parish.
I refer, of course, to Cardinal George Pell who has been transferred from Australia where his ineffectual, sometimes insensitive, oversight of dealings with abused children and their parents was fast becoming an insupportable embarrassment. He became the public face of a church beset with putrid crimes and clumsy cover-ups.
He has been posted to Rome to oversee the reform of the Vatican’s finances, a process that will lead to a church that is not “sloppy or inefficient’’ with its money, he assured the Catholic Herald.
He seems eminently qualified given he was so efficiently parsimonious in dealings in his own archdiocese. Pope Francis wanted a “poor Church for the poor,” but that “doesn’t necessarily mean a Church with empty coffers”, said Pell.
Events suggest that much of Pell’s life as a bishop has been preparation for guarding those coffers.
Pell might have gone to a more tranquil place but his spirit lives in television repeats of interviews and unimpressive appearances at the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into abuse and the royal commission into institutional responses to the scourge.
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