AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph
DOUG CONWAY, AAP SENIOR CORRESPONDENT AAP MAY 30, 2013
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.
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