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Cardinal Pell makes it hard to forgive
By Wendy Tuohy
HEARING and reading Cardinal George Pell’s words in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, you may wonder where his lofty role as His Eminence Catholic Archbishop of Sydney and his day-to-day vocation as a caring leader of children, adults and families intersected — if at all. He held responsibility for the spiritual wellbeing of millions of Australians, yet his demeanour when discussing the devastation of the victims of paedophile priests — and also by church legal action — has been nothing more than clinical. In all of his defence of the “strenuous” and “vigorous” action by his hierarchy aimed at dissuading childhood sex abuse victims from going to court, Pell has appeared via his own testimony and that of other church officials as a hard-headed strategist, an unyielding tactician and an aggressive protector of the church’s wealth. He seems to have excelled at all of those; on Tuesday the inquiry revealed that Sydney’s Catholic archdiocese is sitting on assets worth $1 billion. But victims and their families have every right to ask, as they are doing, where is George Pell’s compassion? Where is his human empathy and, even more importantly, when will they hear his sincere and believable expression of remorse. When will Australia’s most powerful Catholic official take real and full responsibility for the horrendous harm that has pushed an estimated 40 victims to suicide in Victoria alone? So far this week we have seen Pell the defiant: he made eight point-blank denials of pieces of evidence about his actions, given at the hearings by some of his closest church advisers. He said each had just been “wrong” in their statements about what he knew and how hands-on he was in steering the hard-fought legal case against one victim that established the church was not an entity that could be sued. That 2007 action left boyhood priest-abuse victim John Ellis, once a “brilliant” lawyer, a broken man. Ellis had offered to settle out of court for a reparations claim of $100,000, which one senior church official stated that then Archbishop Pell knew — before directing lawyers to put the fragile Mr Ellis through three harsh days of cross-examination. The best Pell could manage on Wednesday was to admit he was aware that the case reduced John Ellis’s mental state to the point where he could barely function, saying it was something he “regrets”. That is in keeping with the impenetrable figurehead Pell has presented throughout. We also have seen Pell the deflector: hardball treatment of sex abuse victims, even until relatively recent times, was down to the Vatican regarding victims as “enemies of the church” out to get it like Nazis or Communists, he told the inquiry. HE went so far as to suggest that by 1995, the Australian Catholic Church was “far ahead” of Rome in acknowledging the sex abuse problem. Yet Melbourne couple Chrissie and Anthony Foster, whose daughters were each raped by a priest from the age of five, and who met Pell, then the Archbishop of Melbourne, to discuss it in 1997, told the Victorian child sex abuse inquiry that Pell was so bullying and confrontational as to have a “sociopathic lack of empathy” in his treatment of them — a statement Anthony Foster reiterated yesterday. Katie Foster is in a wheelchair as a result of the fallout from her repeated childhood rape. Emma Foster killed herself by slashing her wrists. Anthony Foster said last year that when he and his wife presented Archbishop Pell with a picture of Emma as a child and told him how she died, he said matter-of-factly: “Mmm, she’s changed, hasn’t she?” Mr Foster has also said that when he told Pell in that 1997 meeting that Father Kevin O’Donnell had repeatedly raped Emma and Katie as primary school girls, the archbishop replied: “I hope you can substantiate that in court.” Mr Foster has also said that as he tried to outline concerns about how the church’s so-called Melbourne Response was handling claims of priest abuse, Pell interjected: “If you don’t like what we’re doing, take us to court.” Chrissie Foster has written that she went to that meeting as a dedicated servant of her church but came away bullied into submission, crushed and furious. What the Fosters and all the hundreds, possibly thousands of people affected by decades of appallingly handled clergy abuse do not need to see any more is just what they have witnessed at these royal commission hearings: George Pell the detached. If the church is sincere in its statements about wanting to promote authentic healing of victims now, and to really acknowledge their pain, suffering, trauma and lasting damage in a meaningful way, these hearings would have been a good place to start. George Pell has wasted a precious opportunity to do two things preached from pulpits around Australia every week: be humble, ask for forgiveness and honestly repent.
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