Cardinal George Pell’s Mean Spirit in Dealings with Child Abuse Victims Lives on after His Transfer to Rome
By Terry Sweetman
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. Monday night’s Four Corners on events under his stewardship in Melbourne and Sydney was a prelude to the commission’s public hearings in Melbourne and Ballarat. Cardinal George Pell defends confessional protocol The evidence of the abused and their parents becomes no less disturbing despite the monotony of the catalogue of crimes and injustice. And the inadequacy of the church’s response becomes no less infuriating despite the familiarity of the reports. Fortunately for the church – and the abused – kinder, wiser and worldly people are coming more to the fore in the absence of Pell. Among them is Francis Sullivan, boss of the church’s Truth Justice and Healing Council, who on Monday used such words as “unforgivable” (the financial battering given to abuse victim John Ellis in 2007), “shocking, confronting” (his guess that 4 per cent of clergy were pedophiles, twice the estimate of Pope Francis) and “maladministration” (the Doveton church where four successive priests abused children with impunity). He didn’t even flinch at the suggestions that the bishops and archbishops of the church had been made to appear slippery characters (legally speaking). His council has junked some of the noble-sounding but clunky and ineffectual bodies set up to address the abuse crisis during Pell’s reign. “The days of the Catholic Church investigating itself are over,” Sullivan said on Tuesday after formally joining calls for an independent victims’ redress scheme with mandatory participation by the institutions concerned. Cardinal George Pell's Christmas message Cardinal George Pell's Christmas message Fantastic news even though decades too late, but there was a proviso worthy of Pell: The church wants to retain some of its gag orders to prevent victims suing. Deeds of release, some of which contained gag clauses, have been strongly criticised during the royal commission, with the church accused of silencing victims. “A deed of release in a legal sense is about releasing various parties from civil litigation and that’s what they’ve signed,” said Sullivan. “Most people signed deeds of release with legal advice and with knowledge of that.’’ Maybe, but evidence has been given of victims who felt they signed under duress. Joan Isaacs, the very first victim to appear at a public hearing into the Catholic Church said she felt she signed her release “under duress’’. And there has been an avalanche of evidence – sworn and anecdotal – that she was far from alone. For decades, possibly centuries, evil men misused the church’s authority to abuse and to silence innocent children and to intimidate their parents. To pretend that there was not some residual authority, a terrible power imbalance, in wounded people signing deeds of release strikes me as fatuous. It seems only just that the circumstances of those deeds should be contestable, allowing some victims to sue the church for recompense beyond the sometimes miserable sums doled out under the healing process. The council wants payments under the national scheme to be capped “in line with community’’ standards, with those who accept any redress awarded by the national body to lose their right to pursue civil action through courts. Presumably it wants to avoid the ruinous situation in Ireland where the church and the government had to cough up billions to abuse victims. Sensible, if a bit Pellish, but the word “slippery” slithers through my mind. For all that, it has been a goodish week for those seeking justice for the abused and reform within the institutions that were for so long missing in action. Now, all we need is for the Government to stop thinking about it and cough up the two-year extension and the extra $104 million the commission asked for in July to finish its work and, hopefully, draw some kind of line under a national disgrace. Contact: sweetwords@ozemail.com.au
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