David Marr on the long and often controversial career of a ‘bright kid’ who rose from rural Australia to the highest reaches of the Catholic church

A bright kid from an Australian bush town, George Pell kept his nose clean as he rose through the ranks to become chief of the Vatican’s finances. Despite a notably hard heart he was always a valuable asset to the church as a fearless conservative ideologue and a fine administrator.



Young Pell was plucked from Australia to train in Rome and at Oxford for the big career that was always beckoning. He returned to serve briefly and unhappily in a remote parish on the Murray before being brought into the heart of the diocese of Ballarat which was a hell of child abuse.

Pell swears he saw little or nothing in those years.

Strange that the career of a man who would climb so far and so fast was marked early on by such a want of curiosity. He would explain to Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse: “It was a sad story and of not much interest to me.”

He sat on a committee that transferred Father Gerard Ridsdale from parish to parish. The crimes of this vicious paedophile were notorious in Ballarat, known to the bishop and familiar to other members of the committee. But by his own account, Pell never asked why this priest was always on the move.



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Pell was a big man who awed the faithful and impressed politicians. Even in Ballarat he began to display an almost magical ability to extract money from governments. This was to stand him in excellent stead in his Australian career.

So did his decision to put behind him his early enthusiasm for Vatican II. He was just the kind of energetic and worldly priest the new Polish pope admired. The mission of John Paul II was to restore the majesty of the church through fearless orthodoxy. Pell would berate his colleagues for being “frightened to put forward the hard teachings of Christ.”

But John Paul II came with a blind spot that would cause the church immense harm: he was not the least engaged by the scandal of child abuse that broke over his church in the 1980s. The message from Rome was unambiguous: no ambitious priest could build a career by hounding paedophiles from the ranks.

Rome first made Pell head of the Melbourne seminary – where he saw off its more liberal elements – and then appointed him an auxiliary bishop in that huge archdiocese in 1987. He would later be accused of failing to purge paedophile priests from parishes and schools. He has always put his inaction down to lack of knowledge and lack of authority.



In the last years of the old century, Pell’s parallel career in Rome flourished. He was the first Australian ever to join the church’s key ideological body, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In the decade of Pell’s membership, the congregation banned books, silenced theologians, excommunicated Marxists and found fresh ways of excoriating homosexuality.

Rome made him archbishop of Melbourne at the age of 55. Melbourne was his parish. He was always comfortable among the powerful. Now he could demonstrate his immense capacity as an administrator.

Key to Pell’s success in every post he has held in the church is his determination to hire the best professionals, particularly the best accountants and lawyers. They didn’t have to be Catholics. They could be Jews or gay or divorced. That didn’t matter. They had to be the best.

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Pell hired a skilled team to run the Melbourne Response. For nearly a decade the Australian bishops had been dithering over what the church should do for victims of abuse. Just as they were about to launch the scheme called Towards Healing, Pell broke away and set up his own Melbourne scheme. This earned him the enmity of his fellow bishops but allowed him to boast that he was one of the first bishops in the world to address the needs of the abused.



The Melbourne Response saved the church hundreds of millions of dollars, giving small sums to victims and most of the time compelling them to remain quiet about their fate and their settlements.

Melbourne made Pell a national figure for the first time. He earned a certain celebrity for his pugnacious moral declarations. This was Archbishop Pell on boys at Catholic schools driven to suicide by homophobia: “It is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction. Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.”

Pell exercised authority in Australia as few church leaders had before him. He could call Rome to his aid at any time

Not until he became the Archbishop of Sydney in 2001 was there ever a suggestion he might, himself, have abused children. In 2002 he stood aside for some months while a church-appointed commission investigated allegations which, in the end, a retired Victorian supreme court judge found to be not proven.



Pell became a cardinal a year after returning to work. He personally instructed legal teams fighting victims’ claims for compensation to play hardball. Victims who accepted even meagre compensation were usually gagged. One case fought to the finish under Pell’s direction established the principle that victims have no claim against church assets held in property trusts.

Australia remains, as a result, the only country in the common-law world where the Catholic church cannot usefully be sued. There is no money available. Again, this was of immense financial benefit to the church.

Pell exercised authority in Australia as few church leaders had before him. Politicians were attentive. He raised huge sums. He could call Rome to his aid at any time. He chose bishops. He wrote columns for the popular press. He brought to the work of the church his unique brand of high conservatism and tough administration.

Though priests and religious were, by this time, trooping off to prison in alarming numbers, Pell opposed all calls for a royal commission into the scandal of child abuse in the church. Police began complaining of interference by the church in their work. Shocking evidence emerged in Ireland. Australian politicians began to buckle. Try as he might, Pell could no longer hold the line.

Julia Gillard, then prime minister of Australia, appointed the royal commission in November 2012. Pell appeared stunned at the press conference he called that afternoon to promise full cooperation but defend his faith. He said: “We are not interested in denying the extent of misdoing in the Catholic church. We object to it being exaggerated; we object to being described as the only cab on the rank.”

Pell gave evidence many times to the commission learning, slowly at first, to answer questions in ways cardinals are rarely asked to do: by a secular lawyer, usually a woman, with the power to compel answers.

He was no slouch in the witness box but some of his stumbles became famous. Perhaps the worst was the time he compared the church to trucking companies and abusive priests to drivers who assault hitchhikers they pick up along the road. “I don’t think it appropriate for the … leadership of that company be held responsible.”



That notion was met with mirth and disbelief.

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One afternoon he departed the witness box for a vast farewell mass in his cathedral on the eve of his flight to Rome to take up a new post created by Pope Francis. Pell was to become the third ranking figure at the Vatican as cardinal-prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy. His departure from Sydney was widely welcomed in the church in Australia.



Pell was born for the huge job he took up in Rome at the age of 73. He brought to it all his formidable administrative skills. He engaged the finest professionals in Europe to audit Vatican institutions. Within months he reported finding millions of hidden euros. It wasn’t to last. His opponents in Rome soon succeeded in reining in his commission.

When the royal commission asked him to return to give evidence again last year, his doctors declared him unfit to fly. He stared down Tim Minchin’s song Come Home Cardinal Pell (2,027,229 hits) and gave evidence from a hotel ballroom in Rome in the presence of dozens of survivors of abuse who flew to the Eternal City for the occasion.



Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Australian press had begun cautiously reporting police investigations into new allegations of abuse by Pell dating back many years. Pell has denied all of these allegations.

No figure in the church as senior as Pell has ever been charged with sex abuse. After the police announcement in Melbourne, the Vatican machinery moved seamlessly. The pope expressed support. The cardinal stood aside from his many church offices. He made it unequivocally clear that he will return to Australia to appear in that most unlikely forum, a Melbourne magistrate’s court.

He said: “I am looking forward finally to having my day in court.”