George Pell and Jim Molan: Great Australian Patriots

On Fifth Avenue in New York City, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing, a dramatic painting by Emanuel Leutze overwhelms the other contents of an elegant second-floor room. It is Washington Crossing the Delaware, and, just as it spans the entire wall of Met Gallery 760, so it spans the entire imagination of man’s conception of the patriotic. In it, General George Washington points determinedly ahead into dangerous currents, leading a shambolically unprepared group of men into a historic battle against outrageously high odds. Despite a life lived negotiating dangers like these, the patriot Washington lived to see vindication of what he deemed “the cause”—the sublime and revolutionary raison d’être of American man.

Washington is rightly seen as modern history’s foremost embodiment of patriotism. Though we may often forget it, this is not merely because the reds, whites and blues of his personal aesthetic lent themselves so well to romantic posterity. Rather, Washington lives as the eternal patriotic ideal because of an unconditional love of country, and an unremitting preference for meeting with that country’s real circumstances, not its imagined sentiments.

Australia reels today from the successive loss of two patriots in the Washingtonian mould. The deaths of George Pell and Jim Molan are devastating blows to Australian ecclesiastical and political thought. Both were men of national stature, who fused an instinctive love of country with a studied knowledge of Western civilisation. As patriotic archetypes they turned their minds to decidedly national problems. Each had a touch of heroic élan in apprehending Australia’s place in the world. And though church and state bear the grief of these losses internally, there is a greater national loss, too.

That patriotism might entail an unconditional love of country is an obvious enough proposition. But rare is the man who has the spiritual fortitude to maintain that love, undeterred by even the bitterest hatreds. George Washington was denigrated occasionally by rivals and universally adored by his country. George Pell was ruthlessly, dishonestly and systematically denigrated over decades by his countrymen: by the Victoria Police, by a politicised justice system, and by a rabid media sect which appointed itself judge, jury and executioner in his case, long before he even faced trial. He was reviled in Australia, and remains perhaps our most dishonestly-reported-upon public figure.

Yet not a hint of hatred towards his country can be found in any of the hundreds of thousands of words Pell published after his conviction. On the contrary, the pages of his Prison Diary glow with a deep affection for Australia, and a deep love of its people. That is surely the love of a patriot.

Is this not remarkable? In a fully globalised age, it is not unusual for privileged Australians, frustrated at what they perceive as their home country’s “smallness”, to pivot their national affections to foreign lands. Pell could easily have done the same. And though he was a global traveller, he was no “global citizen”, in that ritual manner of national abdication so many elites undertake today.

Pell’s faith, it seemed, placed his country in a special category of divine providence. Convinced of the goodness of God, the Cardinal was unable to view his homeland in any way other than as a Heavenly blessing. That is why even amidst the foulest of abuse, painted as the most wicked of Australian villains, he harboured no ill-will for his accusers, or for their fellow countrymen who rose in falsehood against him. That is also surely why he came home without complaint to face the scandalous charges against him. His return to Victoria in 2017 was a tragedy he willingly partook in. Like Hector of Troy he came of his own accord, obliged to leave the safety of hallowed city walls to face certain death in the hostile plain. And death it was, long before Pell left this earth. As it was for Hector, so too in the case of the Cardinal: a great public life brutally extinguished as payment for the transgressions of disgraced relatives.

A patriotic heart requires its host to fight—even in vain—and in battle Pell was a supreme combatant. His sphere of operation was not military, but it was also not political—as many so often misunderstood. At its core it was not always the institutional church either. Rather, Pell’s principal battleground was that of the spirit. His true enemy was the insidiousness of evil that knows no boundaries, an evil that often manifests in this world in the perversion of cultural relativism. Archbishop Fisher, in eulogising the Cardinal, was right to say that Pell, “like his friend Pope Benedict, regarded cynicism and relativism as poisons”.

Pell’s patriotism led him to understand that whatever Australia’s diaspora of nominal faiths may have been, its nascent spiritual illiteracy posed an extreme threat to its social wellbeing, and to the very substance of its liberal democratic order. Insofar as he was political, it was the political consequence of spiritual concerns that drove him.

As George Pell was a spiritual warrior for the ages, so too was Jim Molan a material one. More than any other Australian, Molan fulfilled that other vital characteristic of patriotism—a preoccupation with real circumstance. As Pell understood the unfolding catastrophe of spiritual illiteracy in Australia’s faith diaspora, so Molan understood the emergent catastrophe within Australia’s political diaspora—its strategic illiteracy being equally as dangerous to our material nationhood. Molan, as an architect of Operation Sovereign Borders, proved himself as sovereign nationhood’s pre-eminent defender in the twenty-first century. That is no exaggeration. Witness the daily death and misery on the US-Mexico border to understand the catastrophic consequences of the de facto abdication of national sovereignty in the West.

The comparison with George Washington holds for Molan too. Amongst America’s founders, Washington was the man most capable of taking real action in honest confrontation with emergent national circumstance. Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the Declaration of Independence, was an almighty patriot. But he is secondary to Washington, because his virtues did not extend beyond philosophical sentiment into real action in the way that Washington’s did.

Like Washington, Molan was a soldier first and a politician second: hence their shared preference for real action over imagined sentiment. In fact it often seemed that Jim Molan was obsessed with real action. This didn’t make him reckless, flippant or bloodthirsty. Rather, it made him a man for our times, and a man for our uniquely precarious Australian circumstances.

Molan’s patriotism in the face of betrayal during the twilight years of his life was remarkable. After being pushed into the unwinnable seventh position on the New South Wales Senate ticket in 2016, he might have given up on his country and resigned himself to private life. He did not. In fact, as a man holding deep faith in a great cause, he pursued his ends more vigorously. Unwell, and in his twilight years, he chose to shake the tree of Australian strategic complacency more violently than ever. His Churchillian forbearance in illustrating Australia’s psychological unpreparedness for war may be his greatest legacy. Further, in voicing out loud what America’s relative decline means for Australia, he articulated what many in Canberra and Washington know, but have hitherto been too scared to say out loud.

Like George Washington, Pell and Molan lived bravely, often pointing headfirst into dangerous currents. Unlike Washington, neither of them was destined to live to see the vindication of their great causes. But then again, it is not vindication that defines the life of a patriot, but a characteristic willingness to forge ahead with what may seem to be the most hopelessly lost thing, out of conviction that the thing is right and just. We should commemorate these two very different, but equally patriotic men for their undying love of Australia, and their steadfast refusal to compromise in meeting the spiritual and material challenges Australia faces.

Ben Crocker is a research fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC, and a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns (https://crockerscolumns.substack.com).