The late great George Pell and his enemies, part 1

How Archbishop Pell, in the 1990s, became the public scapegoat for any and all crimes committed by Catholic priests and bishops in Australia.

On January 10, 2023, George Pell, cardinal-priest of the Catholic Church and former archbishop of Sydney and Melbourne, died suddenly the day after undergoing hip surgery. He was eighty-one years old.

It may seem unusual for a cardinal to have enemies, but it is indisputable that George Pell did. Secular news coverage of his career, both before and after his death, was peppered with reminders to the public that he was one of those most terrible of all things: an orthodox, conservative Catholic priest.

But why did these self-appointed enemies, both inside and outside the Church, hate him so much?

George Pell was born in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, in 1941. His father was a non-attending member of the Church of England and a former heavyweight boxing champion, while his mother was a staunch Catholic who made sure her three children went to Mass every Sunday and prayed the Rosary at home. For most of George’s youth, his parents ran a hotel. A former classmate remembered watching George serve drinks to workers in the hotel’s pub on Saturdays.

George was educated at Catholic schools and earned a reputation for being both an excellent student and athlete. By the time he was eighteen years old, he had decided to become a medical doctor, while also signing a contract to play professionally for the Australian Football League.

But then, “a small cloud,”1 a repeated feeling of dissatisfaction, propelled him through the door of his school’s chaplain. Although the chaplain had already thought to himself that George had the makings of a priest, George himself was not so certain. George’s father was disappointed that he wanted to turn his back on an athletic career, but he told George to make his own decision.

Continued below.

The late Cardinal Pell was vilified by an anti-Catholic Australian media and may have been set up by greedy Vatican employees to get him out of the way.

In 2014, the newly elected Pope Francis decided to improve the state of the Vatican’s finances. He appointed the Australian cardinal George Pell (1941-2023) to be the first prefect of his new Secretariat for the Economy. Pell was seen as the sort of no-nonsense, thorough, and intelligent cardinal who could corral other cardinals into cleaning up their mess.

Pell ordered audits, established policy guidelines, and began to investigate the financial affairs of different Vatican offices. One would think that simply trying to introduce transparency into the Vatican finances would be non-controversial. One would be wrong.

Just as Pell began to uncover problems, a series of child sexual abuse charges from Australia were leveled at Pell in 2017. While he could have remained in Rome and avoided the trial as others have done, he chose to return to his native country to clear his name.

The Victoria Police had apparently spared no expense in trying to uncover dirt on George Pell—and him alone—going back to 2013. They produced dozens of witnesses in court in 2018, but those alleged witnesses could only offer fuzzy charges and testimonies, which is why the jury could not agree on a verdict.

Their indecision is not surprising because the two strongest allegations against Pell sound ridiculous to anyone who has regularly attended the Catholic Mass. Two boys claimed that Pell exposed himself to them after Mass in the sacristy of the cathedral. But how could Pell reasonably have done that while fully vested for Mass? Why wouldn’t he have been outside the front door of church, like every other priest after a Sunday Mass (including Pell), talking to his parishioners? Where were the other priests who typically accompany a bishop at Mass? And wouldn’t it have been incredibly stupid for a priest to expose himself in a public place like the sacristy, where a random parishioner might show up at any moment to ask for a blessing of a new rosary?

Continued below.