Cleaning up the post-George Pell parish in Sydney

By Elizabeth Farrelly
Sydney Morning Herald
April 2, 2014

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/cleaning-up-the-postgeorge-pell-parish-in-sydney-20140402-zqpn5.html

George Pell wants to insure priests against being sued for child sexual abuse. My head is still rotating on its axis. Our man in purple, our alpha priest, moral paragon. Our Vatican princeling, just days from taking up his dauphindom in Rome: he said that? He dropped this fissile solipsism on our public debate and left, smacking the dust from his hands like, we're done now, right?

For this was no dinner party throw-away. The cardinal – fully frocked, schooled and premeditated – breathed his proposition into the stone tablets of a royal commission. He wanted it recorded and kept. Forever.

But insurance? Does he think child sex is some unavoidable occupational hazard? Something a priest will sooner or later fall to? An accident? If you wanted to maximise the damage already done to countless children, you'd be hard put to find a surer way, or crueller.

It was already accepted that the church had systematically preyed on its charges, breaking their still-soft hearts by telling them not just to take it and be quiet, but that this – this! – is how God loves them.

That was just the proto-damage. The church knowingly exacerbated it by arguing that it was the child's fault. This cynical use of attack as defence was unalloyed evil, meant to demolish an already frail defendant by pretending that the church, and its interfering priests, were the true victims.

Sexual abuse fires slow-release poison into the child's core but such lofty, casualising denial retrospectively reloads the gun with soft-nose bullets. The entry wound maims, yes. But it's the exit wound that tears you apart.

This is on par with stoning rape's victims rather than its perpetrators. At least there we sign global petitions, shocked that religious leaders would even condone, much less instigate, such barbarism. But when it's our own ultra-powerful clerics, we barely notice.

Still not content, Pell added yet a third trivialising layer, his priestly child-abuse insurance scheme.

Consider for a moment. Is abuse insurance like car insurance, green-slip to start and no-claim bonus for good behaviour? Or is it like health insurance where you select your cover to suit. Ten grand, say, for talking dirty to preschoolers. A hundred grand for touching. What, half-a-mill for penetration? Or is professional indemnity the model – the surgeon's slip of the knife, the architect's of the pen?

Apologies if you think this talk indelicate but, as the sex fiend said to the shrink, I'm not the one drawing the dirty pictures here.

Insurance is risk management.  Pell's purpose, one can only presume, was to downscale the entire abuse project from major moral issue to mere workplace risk. This is appeasement, the moral equivalent of adapting to, rather than mitigating, climate change. Is this what confession teaches? Outsource your risk?

I’m no church-hater. Hardly. Richard Dawkins' angry atheism strikes me as flat and unimaginative, intelligence betrayed. Christopher Hitchens' repudiation of the church's ''appalling crime, error, cruelty, stupidity and offences to the free intelligence'' and even Stephen Fry's moving anti-church tirade, while both vastly more eloquent, are still unconvincing. You don't reject a creed for the failings of its followers.

But when those failings are criminal, cruel and systematically – nay, collusively – camouflaged, something needs to be done. Especially when that collusive institution's core promise is a moral one.

I'm drawn to the church for its part in the battle of good and evil. If it abandons the fight for good and simply insures against evil? Forget it. I'm gone.

Pell doesn't seem to understand that priestliness is not a mitigating factor here. Priestliness makes abuse worse, not better. Way worse. Yet the punishment is feather-light.

If this were some dumb corporation – some downtown retailer, say – a far lesser abuse scenario would have seen heads roll, many and large. Were the abuser Joe Blow, he'd be jailed as a rock spider. Were the abuse organised, secret, power-protected, woe betide, especially the ringleader.

Yet Paragon Pell shrugs, denies responsibility and skips away to Rome. A fine example he set, squirming in the witness box, blaming his colleagues, his lawyers and the children themselves. Yet the church, far from enforcing virtue, promotes him.

This is mediaeval. It's Chaucerian. It's Friar Tuck and the evil prioress. It's church of the 10-course stuffed-spatchcock banquet while the peasants starve. Stephen Fry believes ''history whinnies and quivers and vibrates in all of us'' but it seems we've forgotten the blatant greed, hypocrisy and betrayal that drove the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

Yet still people trust their kids to this institution. Why? Because of that old atavistic fear that the fat priests, however gross, might just be right. These same rock spider clerics may be the only conduit to God.

Which is how the whole power trip works, and why it's wrong. I don't imagine it's even legal to insure against a crime you might, soon, commit. But even if it were, how could such a licence-to-sin be right?

Let's be clear. Child abuse is no accident. It's not just something that will, now and then, happen. If you're an even half-decent person, much less a spiritual leader, you needn't insure against kiddie fiddling. You just need to abstain.

Or is abstinence something the church no longer expects of itself?

What part of all this does the cardinal, and the church that has just kicked him upstairs, not understand?

What they do understand is money. Pell's cruelty was thrift led. In spending $2 million to defend a case he could have settled for $750,000, he was penning a missive to all those other lives broken by "mother church": don't even think about it. To this extent it's clear the Vatican has picked the right man as financial honcho: someone prepared to prioritise money over morality.

All of which suggests that Pell regards child abuse more as a human accident than, scarier still, an uninsurable Act of God. For many parents, a Catholic upbringing is a way of insuring their kids. Perhaps they should also insure them against it.