Pell's Great Test of Faith

By Doug Conway
Daily Telegraph
May 30, 2013

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/pells-great-test-of-faith/story-fni0xqi3-1226653867523

GOD chose George Pell before Richmond Football Club could. But is the former ruckman now a religious tiger who has been forced to change his stripes a little?

Australia's most senior Catholic churchman had a professional Aussie Rules contract in his bag in his last year at school.

He was also toying with life as a lawyer or doctor.

But faith inexorably pulled him away, and instead the 18-year-old country boy from Ballarat entered Melbourne's Corpus Christi Seminary in 1960.

"I had fought against it for a long time," he once said. "But I suspected and became convinced that God was calling me to do his work. I've never regretted it, though I still marvel that I made the leap and gave it a go."

Cardinal Pell's faith must have been sorely tested as he confronted perhaps the most pernicious evil lurking beneath the surface of Australian society for decades - the sexual abuse of children by priests in his church, including one he had shared a residence with.

It must have been tested even further this week when he appeared before a royal commission in Melbourne, where he was once archbishop, to make a series of extraordinary admissions.

The current Archbishop of Sydney acknowledged that senior church figures had covered up abuse and destroyed records, had moved abusers from parish to parish where they committed further crimes, and accepted that these crimes had contributed to "too many suicides".

Testifying before scores of victims and campaigners, many of whom turned their backs on him at one point, Cardinal Pell said he was "fully apologetic and absolutely sorry" on behalf of the church.

He expressed regret that he had once caused angst to victims by accompanying Ballarat pedophile priest Gerald Risdale to court, explaining he was acting out of priestly solidarity in a way he would mirror for any parishioner.

He conceded the church had recognised its problem with pedophilia as far back as 25 years ago.

He also suggested clerical celibacy might have been a factor in some cases, and might help explain the high incidence of pedophilia in the church.

This from a doctrinal die-hard who once said abandoning celibacy vows would be a "serious blunder"? Does such a change signify a melting of staunch, some might say old-fashioned, views? Does he, then, still fully support clerical celibacy?

Cardinal Pell has long been regarded as a social progressive and a religious conservative. He has proved a formidable ecclesiastical politician. His admirers, among them the Vatican hierarchy, laud him as a forthright upholder of Catholic purity.

But when he was made a cardinal in 2003, critics saw his elevation as part of a global drive by Pope John Paul II, and his doctrinal watchdog, arch-conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, to install ultra-orthodox clerics in place of more independent-minded bishops.

His appointment would help underpin the church's unwavering stance on many hot issues, such as its opposition to abortion, gay marriage and women priests.

He sparked an outcry in 2009 when he backed Pope Benedict's view that the solution to the AIDS epidemic lay not in the distribution of condoms but in the practice of sexual abstinence and monogamy within marriage.

The AIDS Council of NSW said Cardinal Pell's statements, including remarks that condoms encouraged promiscuity, contradicted "all evidence" that they reduced the transmission of HIV.

When the current royal commission was announced, he prompted another heated debate when he said priests who heard confessions from pedophiles must remain bound by the "inviolable" seal of confession.

He angered environmentalists with a 2006 speech in which he dismissed "hysterical" claims about global warming, saying, "In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions."

Cardinal Pell's appearance at the royal commission was dismissed as a "cynical exercise in damage control" by barrister and victims' advocate Bryan Keon-Cohen QC, who said he had tried to evade responsibility.

Cardinal Pell certainly went to great lengths to point out that although he might be one of the better known faces of the Catholic Church in Australia his authority was limited.

"I'm not the Catholic prime minister of Australia. I am not the general manager of Australia," he said, explaining that he only had jurisdiction within his Sydney diocese.

The 71-year-old cardinal is a cultured and educated man who loves classical art, literature and music.

But the Monash and Oxford-educated churchman is far from aloof, according to friends who praise his ability to relate to ordinary people, a skill they say he acquired early in life while helping out in the bar of his parents' pub.

Cardinal Pell may need that skill now more than ever.

He was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of young Australians when he welcomed the Pope to Sydney for World Youth Day in 2008, but some now question just how in touch he is with contemporary thinking.

He had a voice in electing the last two Popes, and is one of eight cardinals appointed to advise Pope Francis on how to reform the Catholic Church. Progressives hope this may involve reforming some of his own views.