Cardinal George Pell — the Man of God We Know

By Ruth Lamperd
Sunday Herald
March 30, 2014

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cardinal-george-pell-the-man-of-god-we-know/story-fni0fit3-1226868668147

TALL George Pell might have been anything other than a priest. That’s what most of his classmates expected. A teacher. A footballer for Richmond. A lawyer, maybe.

So when he lined up for the priesthood at the Werribee Corpus Christi seminary in the summer of 1960, it surprised many of his school friends.

Young George hit 6 ft 3 (1.9m) by the time he was 15. He was commanding and jovial, the centre of boarding house social life. The boys at St Patricks College, Ballarat, thought they had him worked out. But with a devout Irish Catholic mother and a priest uncle, the jump to the seminary may not have been so hard to fathom.

It emerged during his training years that he was a stickler for church-ordained truth and tradition. He loved a debate, particularly so because, as a former colleague says, he was “always right”. He was “dismissive” of those who didn’t agree with him.

His liturgical accent would have been at home in the wooden panels of a courtroom. At least two of his former classmates could more easily see a black lawyer’s gown billowing about his broad shoulders, a white wig on his head, not a cross hanging by a chain around his neck.

“When George went to seminary that year after high school, we were very surprised,” a former student tells the Herald Sun.

“He had a legalistic mind and a sharp tongue. We thought he’d have done very well as a scallywag lawyer.”

References to Cardinal George Pell’s legal acumen have been raised often in the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal.

To many of the victims, he seemed to be dragged with the church to the table. A man who came across to many as cold and clinical over an issue that instead needed warmth and clear compassion.

He flew out yesterday to the Vatican, taking up a new position as the Prefect for the Economy of the Holy See — Pope Francis’s biggest hope to reform 500 years of financial complications at best, fraud and skulduggery at worst.

Public inquiries to confront sexual abuse on young innocents that spanned decades are left half a world away.

He walked from the Royal Commission hearing room in Sydney on Thursday afternoon. Intense questioning for days about his knowledge of a hard-line legal approach to abuse victim John Ellis, was followed by a thanksgiving and farewell mass for the Cardinal at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney that night.

Mr Ellis stumbled from the Royal Commission hearing room. Decades of fighting for that apology had taken a toll. He’d been through the shredder and finally the man in charge had apologised.

But instead of gathering cameras for a triumphant interview about victory over the church, Mr Ellis went home. He said he was spent.

The apology came at the end of Cardinal Pell’s appearance. He read it from a piece of paper. Victims of abuse were aghast he didn’t look up at Mr Ellis.

“It’s like he was confessing. With a lawyer looking over his shoulder,” one detractor said afterwards. “In a confession box, you don’t have to look anybody in the eye.”

YOUNG Pell’s way of connecting was through ribbing. He was the classroom stirrer. He was outspoken. The boy who was later to become Australia’s most senior contribution ever to the Vatican was the chief teaser in his friendship group.

A fellow seminary student with Pell recalls his inability to tone down his taunts to a few visiting Americans students. They were insulted at the intensity of his Aussie stir. He was always taking the mickey out of someone.

“Everyone else knew Americans didn’t understand our humour. Except George. We were left having to calm them down a bit,” the former student, who asked not to be named, says.

This picture of a young Pell doesn’t match those of devout Catholics who remember him from his days as Archbishop of Melbourne. By then he’d grown up.

Thirty years on, he had a liturgical aura that demanded the respect of his followers. He came across as thoughtful, a listener, an intelligent, considerate man appropriate to his station.

Danielle Lupi helped run a drug and alcohol issues group Cardinal Pell set up after he became Melbourne Archbishop in 1996. It was part of his Youth Forum to tend to what many saw was the most vulnerable group of the Catholic Church — it’s future members.

“I always found him contemplative and a deep thinker, listening and absorbing what we were saying,” Lupi says.

“And he was quiet. Maybe people misunderstood his quietness for arrogance.”

That’s how Chrissie and Anthony Foster saw Pell as well. They were devout Catholics, dedicated to God and their family. And they looked up to their Archbishop.

When it emerged their daughter was a sexual abuse victim, at the hand of their parish priest Fr Kevin O’Donnell, they met with then-Archbishop Pell. At this time in February 1997, O’Donnell was already serving three decades in jail.

Chrissie recalls her desperation to show Archbishop Pell that the Catholics alleging abuse were not troublemaking money-grabbers. She thought he’d understand once they’d seen him. She thought she could turn the church’s negative attitude about victims to one of acceptance.

“I wanted to convince Archbishop Pell that my daughter wasn’t a liar — that I wasn’t an enemy,” Chrissie says.

But she says the George Pell she confronted that day was one she didn’t recognise. To her he wasn’t a kind priest, but a lawyer. A legal steamroller. She doesn’t recall him saying hello as she walked into his office.

“I was totally taken aback with this confrontational meeting. A huge man sitting there, angrily rebutting everything we said, telling us to prove it in court,” Chrissie says. “And this was over allegations of a man already jailed.”

The allegations were proved in court and daughter Emma won nine times the maximum payout then being offered by the Catholic Church. But in 2008 Emma took her own life.

“I went there with trust and devotion and left devastated. The treatment from the church wiped away any skerrick of faith in the Catholic Church.

“And George Pell was at the heart of it.” His supporters contend Cardinal Pell — a man committed to holding up faith of Catholics and Christians in general — would have hoped to achieve the opposite. They say it’s what he joined the priesthood for.

But early on, it was clearer to those close to him his devotion to the Catholic establishment seemed to ring most true.

TRAINING priests back in the 1960s went to Rome to study for three years at Propaganda Fide College. A group of about 25 Australians were among them in Cardinal Pell’s years.

For many of those, faced with the hundreds of years of stiff Catholic tradition, it was confronting. For some of them to toe the line was impossible.

One recalls student Pell’s indignation after some rogue Australians skipped an early pre-breakfast mass to enjoy instead a high-point mass later in the morning. As the story goes, Pell told them it wasn’t the role of the young to challenge tradition.

And another describes four of the Australians who were the first to buck the custom of joining the Pious Association of Mary Immaculate, closely associated with the medieval custom of “indulgences”. Even by the 1960s that practice of buying forgiveness of sins had by some been dismissed as a money-grabbing sham.

“George was beside himself. He was outraged that maverick priests in training from Australia should dare to challenge a 400-year tradition. I think he was ashamed to be one of us,” a former colleague says.

He describes a man who would not budge for the sake of popular opinion. And one that believed anybody who spoke against the church was an “enemy”.

The notion that “those not for the church are against us” in particular was seen as Middle Ages nonsense by some of his contemporaries.

Early last week, Cardinal Pell confirmed the existence of that mindset to the Royal Commission. He said some in the Vatican had an attitude that criminal claims against priests were made by “enemies of the church to make trouble”.

Many see the enemy theory as the chief reason held by Catholic leadership that tripped up the church in the decades-long sex abuse scandal.

The Catholics in charge didn’t see the abuse as it was — criminal acts by criminals. The good men of God didn’t look hard enough so the evil could flourish.

GEORGE Pell has always held if he’d known about the abuse, he’d have moved to stop it. He wasn’t averse to hard work, it seems. And that job would be the hardest.

The traditionalist handwrote everything. Hundreds of speeches were scrawled onto lined paper, and edited by Monsignor Charles Portelli for the five years he spent as the Archbishop’s driver, ghostwriter, ceremony-preparer and proof-reader.

Monsignor Portelli himself has 230 speeches stored on his computer from those days. It was a busy time. They would be on the road every Thursday to Sunday, for 50 weeks a year.

Another person close to Cardinal Pell recalls he worked from 7am till 11pm, when he’d return sometimes to write papers and speeches and homilies into the early hours of the morning.

George Pell didn’t like mobile phones. He got an early brick-like one in the mid-90s. He’d left it charging in his car. When Monsignor Portelli found it, the console was belching smoke and “hot as Hades”.

Monsignor Portelli spoke last week of a friend and boss who was never once challenged discourteously in his hundreds of visits to schools, parish events and church openings.

This was despite saying some unpopular things that rankled mainstream Catholics and left some from the unchurched world angry. His conservative approach to family, to contraception and to women in the church simply matched teachings from Rome.

There could have been plenty of grounds for even his followers to confront him.

“But people didn’t. He was always held in very high regard and received with courtesy. And he still is. But this is never mentioned,” Monsignor Portelli says.

A Catholic lay person who worked closely with Cardinal Pell says he would always find time in a busy schedule to christen babies and bury relatives of friends.

And he had many friends cultivated over years. But finding them to speak about personal experiences with the church man is hard. It seems his life was the church. There are snippets. He didn’t like couscous. He insisted on a wee-hours Christmas party after midnight mass. He shunned tech gadgets and seemed to wear that badge proudly. The people who know him find that quaint, rather than stodgy.

There is no sense of a man disengaged with his parishioners or laziness brought by the acquisition of political church power.

He surrounded himself with people that agreed with him and spoke down dissenters.

He is lauded by many as the one responsible for the tripling of seminary members in Melbourne and Sydney after an overhaul of the system. And he pushed a study series To Know, Worship and Love, now central to Catholic schools’ kindergarten to Year 12 curriculum. Hundreds of victims and families believe his repentance comes from a different place other than genuine humility and regret. A clinking, sterile place of lawyers and manufactured perceptions. Apologies that seem hollow, too forced and too late to be worth the paper they’re almost always written on. But the devout see him differently, through the eyes of faithfulness. They accept Cardinal Pell’s apologies and attempts to help heal the abused when he became Archbishop of Melbourne as the sign of a man with a good heart who is willing to admit his mistakes.

“There isn’t a well-balanced vision of Cardinal Pell,” Danielle Lupi says.

“As with anyone, there is good and there are mistakes. He has had to cop it. It’s normal for anybody who has to face this that they’ll come under scrutiny and attack. I’m proud and humbled that he’s acknowledged his many mistakes.”