George Pell: Keeping Hatred Out of His Heart

What a strange thing the aftermath of the death of George Pell has been and yet how predictable. Two former prime ministers and the leader of the opposition in attendance at the requiem mass at St Mary’s Cathedral, but no sign of the New South Wales Premier despite the staunchness of his Catholicism and no one from the Labor Party unless you include that revenant of Labor parties past, Mark Latham. Tony Abbott, though, said the Cardinal was the finest person he had ever met, the greatest Catholic ever to come out of Australia, and in fact a saint to whom we should address our prayers.

There was no danger, however, of Pell being deemed corrupt because all men praised him—a misgiving he mentions in his journal and one which haunted his avatar Cardinal Manning, the eminent English Victorian who made Catholicism into a thing of bricks and mortar and who had something of Cardinal Pell’s bluffness and instinctive conservatism. There were the cries of execration in the streets outside the cathedral—“George Pell burn in hell” or words to that effect. There was Chrissie Foster, whose daughter had killed herself as a consequence of a priest’s abuse, and who thought there was no empathy in the churchman who had been the Vatican Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy and battled ecclesiastical financial skulduggery with every inch of his being but who had spent more than 400 days in prison as a consequence of his conviction for orally raping two choirboys when he was Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996.

At first there had been a mistrial (with ten of eleven jurors for acquittal) then a conviction, followed by a staggering loss in the Victorian Court of Appeal—which mercifully came with a thundering dissenting judgment from the minority judge, Mark Weinberg; then, by the grace of God, a total exoneration from the unanimous bench of the High Court of Australia. The acquittal was framed as these things must be in terms of beyond a reasonable doubt, but both the appeals had been conducted by Bret Walker SC with a meticulous forensic brilliance that bid fair to convince anyone who could follow a legal argument.

Pell’s defence during the two initial trials—the mistrial and the one that resulted in a conviction in 2018—had been conducted by Robert Richter QC, the Red Baron as they call him. When my brother Greg Craven in his Crown Counsel days had had dealings with Richter, the liberal Jewish silk had said to him, “Craven, if you use Jesuitical sophistry with me I will use Rabbinical cunning with you.” And when Greg, a close friend of the Cardinal who went on to be the Vice Chancellor of the Catholic University George Pell established, was asked who should represent the beleaguered Prince of the Church said, “I will give you three names: Richter, Richter and Richter.”

After the second trial, Richter, risking contempt of court, said, “We have convicted an innocent man. It doesn’t happen very often.” He told me, “It’s a Lindy Chamberlain situation.” He said on one occasion in the past he had seen a client he thought innocent convicted but in that case the weight of the circumstantial evidence at least made the verdict explicable. And his description of George Pell was telling and perhaps a shade different from the image. “He’s a humorous man and a spiritual man.” And how would he cope with prison? “Like the man he is,” Richter said in tones of iron faith. He added, “George’s dealings have understandably been more with the New Testament but I recommended to him that he have another look at the Book of Job.”

Remember Job and the terrible injustices God allows him to suffer: Job who curses the night when a manchild was conceived—“Let that day be darkness”. The Book of Job is one of the literary summits of the Hebrew Bible not least because it is at the tormented edge of tragedy and its solemnity, its profundity, is not separate from the overwhelming temptation to despair. And when the Lord Most High appears it’s with a savage splendour way beyond sympathy. “Canst thou draw forth Levithan?” he asks in lofty derision. “Man is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down … and continueth not.” This note of elegy is the least of it with Job.

Well, George Pell in his prison diaries describes Robert Richter as “not a theist … but a Jew”, acknowledging the power and depth of friendship. He concludes on looking at Job that Christianity has made things better because the soul does see God and does not just drift down as a piece of nothingness and non-existence to Sheol. He cherishes scripture but he says of another work which like Job fits no category, the Book of Ecclesiastes (“vanity of vanities, all is vanity … the sun also ariseth … there is a time to love and a time to hate … much study is a weariness of the flesh”) and says that it is the most “pagan” book in the Bible. You can see what he means, but “agnostic” might be the more precise term. In any case, I wrote a piece about George Pell’s trial after the first conviction and before the Victorian appeal, which discussed the Book of Job in the light of two recordings, one by the greatest Lear of his generation, Paul Scofield—remember him as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, a play Richter quotes—and one by Laurence Olivier who is a terrifying heldentenor of the most high and a sarcastically insinuating Satan who in this near tragedy with its great power of blackness is thought to be a manifestation of the left hand of God.

Questions of scripture and envisionings of tragedy in Job or futility in Ecclesiastes have their place in this story of a man who flew so high and did no conscious wrong and yet was locked up for more than a year over charges that should never have been brought. Victoria Police went off on a fishing expedition of their own. There were no complaints against Pell; they sought out who they could get to testify against him. This was the crime hunt of commissioner Graham Ashton: the police wanted runs on the board, they wanted the easy get of clerical malfeasance, and what bigger fish than the Cardinal who could look too tough and lofty for words and who had also been such a target of that Royal Commission that had turned out in the case of Cardinal Pell to be such a witch hunt?

The Director of Public Prosecutions was unimpressed by the case and initially refused to touch it, only to eventually say to the police: well, if you insist, you bring it. It will stand as an eternal anomaly of this case that Pell was found guilty by the second Victorian jury of having molested a choirboy other than J who in fact never claimed to have been forced to fellate the Archbishop and according to Louise Milligan in her scurrilous case for a hypothetical prosecution explicitly denied to his mother that it had ever happened: tragically, he died of a heroin overdose in 2014, though you would be taking the wildest of jumps to assume that this was prima facie evidence of sexual assault by Pell or anybody else.

Anybody else is, however, a potent element in this sad and ghastly saga. Some believe that someone—some clerical figure—molested J, but this person was not George Pell, that what we’re dealing with is a form of displacement. This is scarcely impossible in the case of a figure like the Cardinal who impressed his personality so strongly on the community from very early and lived, alas, to see himself change from a figure of striking charm and strength of presence (regardless of whether you agreed with him) to a figure of execration. There is a sense in which George Pell became a kind of collective hallucination. Anyone who looks at the recorded encounters with Ned Kelly in the later nineteenth century will be aware of this phenomenon. Sir John Monash’s proudest moment, he said, was when a bushranger said to him, “Hey, sonny, hold my stirrups for me while I rob this bank,” and my great grandmother in her nineties when I was a boy too tiny to remember her said the helmeted hero had given her boiled lollies.

If this sounds fanciful think of the Phillip Island accusation in 2002 when a man accused George Pell of having interfered with him as a young seminarian known as “Big George” back in the 1960s. The retired judge who heard the case in the church trial George Pell organised, Alec Southwell, said both parties sounded convincing and sincere but there was too little evidence to find Pell guilty. The argument one hears put—not least by critics of Pell—is that, okay, he didn’t do it, but the explanation for the accusation (and its apparent sincerity) is that “Big George”, the most powerful person around on that long ago beach camp, had a duty of care which he neglected. This is a recurrent theme with George Pell: he represents the power and glory of the face of the Church but even when the accusation is false the responsibility for the lack of duty of care is real. Yes, it’s a displacement memory but “Big George” should have stopped it.

This is precisely the argument that surfaces decades later with the choirboy allegations. Plenty of people to begin with—and a very significant fraction now—accepted that George Pell was innocent of the specific charges, that at worst they were improbable and a long way from beyond a reasonable doubt, that in fact they were a consequence of a police force wanting a win in a historical context where they had themselves been complicit with child abuse, clerical or otherwise. However, they resist the full ghastly implication of what was done to George Pell so they say, all right, he was innocent of the charges, of course the High Court was right, but he deserved his stint in prison because of the abuses he allowed in the Church for which he must take responsibility.

This is, if you reflect on it, a bizarre situation because it allows anybody to be punished not for any specific offences but because you do not like what you think of their generalised attitude or the way you choose to construe it.

Cast your mind back to November 2012 when Julia Gillard established the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse (and, to be fair, rang George Pell straight away to tell him). Gillard, whose government was doomed, was riding relatively high at this instant because she had given her famous speech on not being lectured on misogyny by “this man” (Tony Abbott) and many people admired the speech and forgot in the midst of their admiration that the context was Peter Slipper, Gillard’s turncoat Speaker who allowed her minority government an extra vote.

By calling the Royal Commission, did she think the spotlight on the Catholic Church would be damaging to Abbott, the “mad monk” as he was called because of his long-ago studies for the priesthood and his unashamed Catholic fealty? It would be uncharitable to think so but there was clearly, from the start, the danger of a witch hunt and witch hunts are at their most virulent and vicious, their most blind and cruel, when there is an overwhelming belief in witches.

Now no one could doubt the record of widespread historical abuse of children by some fraction of Catholic priests and brothers. It’s a long time since Mark Coleridge, the Archbishop of Brisbane, a liberal prelate with a sharp agnostic intelligence, said on the ABC’s Q&A to a panel that included the gay comedian and auteur Josh Thomas, “We used to think it was a moral problem where in fact it was a systemic problem.” In other words, the old Catholic attitude—bearing in mind that Catholicism is a religion with a belief in both free will and the absolute forgiveness of any sin, however grave, where there is contrition––could encompass in a way that shocks us absolutely that a bishop or the head of a religious order saying, “Did you do this? That’s disgusting. Don’t do it again.” And then the offender would be transferred to some parish in the country. The fact that this attitude seems to us objectively appalling and led to or enabled repetitive offending should not make it beyond human understanding.

At around the time Gillard announced her Royal Commission the eminent English journalist Dame Anne Leslie said on the BBC news panel show Dateline London that as a girl she’d been chased around rooms by some dirty old brigadier. She didn’t find this fun but she didn’t feel vengeful about it. This was also the period when the world discovered the molesting truth about Jimmy Saville. We sometimes choose to forget how much the past is another country.

But witch hunts take their bearings from the horrified apprehension of witches and their strange powers of evil enchantment. Think of the element of unreason that seized the nation at the outset of the Royal Commission. We had Bill Shorten, educated at the great Jesuit school Xavier College, saying that no Catholic priest should be allowed the seal of confession, and a bit incredibly, we had that Adelaide Catholic Christopher Pyne rushing to express agreement. The Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said the question should be looked at despite the fact that the seal of confession was guaranteed in the Crimes Act. Everyone was carrying on about the confessional seal as if it was crucial to the unmasking of pedophiles, though no one had any worries about it in the case of murder or other high crimes.

It finally took Father Frank Brennan, the eminent Jesuit lawyer—son of Sir Gerard Brennan, the formulator of Mabo—to say flatly that he would go to prison rather than break the seal of confession. He also added that these days confession tended to be a public collective thing anyway.

But the kerfuffle about the seal of confession underlines a degree of hysteria in response to the sorts of crimes that the Royal Commission would look at and the horror occasioned by a corrupt Church which is pertinent to what happened to George Pell.

There is no denying the particular horror of the level of abuse which at one point prevailed in Ballarat and the way the crimes of people like Gerald Ridsdale and the Christian brother Edward Dowlan became a hellish masquerade in the minds of the Australian public. For what it’s worth, George Pell says in his journals that the Royal Commission was good for the Church and good for victims though it caused a degree of anti-Catholic feeling that was partly justified. Under the circumstances of his unjust prison sentence, much of it in solitary confinement, this is exceptionally fair minded.

In order to understand the trials of George Pell it is necessary to understand what happened to him at the Royal Commission. In March 2016 when he testified from Rome for many, many hours, there was a constant emphasis on what he might have known which tended to beg the question of what constitutes knowledge and how it consorts with degrees of power.

Hadn’t he sat on a committee that had recommended that Gerald Ridsdale be moved on? What about the complaint about some Christian Brother? Cardinal Pell recalled a boy telling him when he was a young priest decades ago about excessive discipline but he heard the Christian Brothers were handling this.

Over and over in the Royal Commision, at which he was subjected to ferocious questioning from the assisting counsel Gail Furness SC, the Cardinal said he hadn’t been told about whatever by the Catholic Education Office or the Archbishop or whoever. When he slipped and said he wasn’t interested in the Ridsdale case (meaning, pretty clearly, the grisly details) it occasioned horror and outrage and disbelief.

But wasn’t it feasible enough that the other Catholic consultors or the previous Archbishop Sir Frank Little had been sparing enough about what they told “Big George”, the bull in the china shop? As the questions went on and on, hectoringly, unbelievingly, Pell came across more and more as a man under siege, a man whose telegraphic, tight-lipped answers could be interpreted (if you were bent on accentuating the negative) as the disingenuous and mendacious strategy of a man who embodied the self-serving arrogance of an unfeeling, brutal and corrupt Church, a man who cared about nothing but getting out of a tight spot. At a certain point it became obvious that what we were witnessing was a show trial. The Royal Commission was willing to accept that various other consultors, consultants on committees, had not known about various matters but not Big George.

We were showing no mercy to this administrator who had been such a politician to the Lord. We refused to believe a word he said because we didn’t like him. And we had come, long after sectarianism had faded from the earth, to think of the Catholic Church as nothing but a byword for sexual abuse. It was a form of lunacy because everyone knew that even if the figure of abusing clergy was as high as 6 per cent (which seems improbable) this meant 94 per cent of the brothers and priests were not guilty of sexual abuse.

We also knew from practical experience and the statistics that the likeliest abuser was the friend of the family, the babysitter, the nice guy next door. Wherever children were cared for and perhaps most particularly where they seem to be cared for most, there would be risk: scouts, swimming coaches, footy devotees, the tweedy classics master inducting people into the glories of Latin and Greek, it was always possible. We were as a society just a little bit crazy about the issue as if the innocence of a child was the only taboo we had left. On ABC radio with Helen Razer, it was difficult to convince a caller that someone snapping pics of little-league footballers might have an innocent motive or, indeed, that the act was intrinsically innocent. Think of the execration the nation’s greatest photographer Bill Henson was subjected to long after his reputation and his probity were established. So the tough indomitable George Pell came to be the scapegoat—as Tony Abbott said at his funeral—for the church he had led with a good deal of courage, however imperiously.

After his Royal Commission testimony, the Cardinal spoke to Andrew Bolt on television (and, yes, you may abhor Bolt as well) and seemed at one moment to weep. He spoke with all the sincerity he could command—with a degree of gentleness—to the complainants who had gathered to harry him.

Let’s move sideways to the man’s personality and style. Here is David Marr in the Quarterly Essay he wrote about George Cardinal Pell—which I reviewed for the Australian on October 19, 2013 and which I had tried to commission him to do many years earlier. Marr was hyperconscious of the fact that George Pell had the authority of a natural-born headmaster. He writes in the Quarterly Essay with his usual unsurpassable eloquence. Here is his description of Pell before the Victorian inquiry which proceeded the Royal Commission:

He never lost his temper but his colour rose all afternoon. He smiled once or twice after negotiating a difficult passage. He clasped and unclasped his hands, never quite in prayer. He droned, he snapped. At times he stared at those six politicians with a gaze focused somewhere south of Macquarie Island …

But it has taken me months to realise how baffled Pell was that afternoon. He can admit the worst, that the church hid abuse for fear of scandal, and that this facilitated appalling crimes. He knows children have been wrecked. He gets all that. He apologises again and again … What he doesn’t get is the hostility to the church. Whatever else he believes in, Pell has a profound faith in the Catholic church. He guards it with his life. Nations come and go but the church remains … it survives unchanged and unbowed.

David Marr does not understand how the liberal Sydney priest Ed Campion, the model for Thomas Keneally’s priest in Three Cheers for the Paraclete, could say the reason he stays a Catholic is “because it is still discernibly the institution that built Chartres”. For Marr the ultimate mystery of George Pell is how he can swallow the baloney of religion and this leads him to this conclusion:

I wonder how much of the strange ordinariness of George Pell began 50 years ago when the robust schoolboy decided as an act of heroic piety to kill sex within himself. The gamble such men take is that they may live their whole lives without learning the workings of an adult heart. Their world is the church. People are shadowy. Pell is one of these: a company man of uncertain empathy … He has what inspired him from the start, a place at the highest levels of his church and a voice in the nation. He has power. His mitred head nods politely as he passes.

This is all very well but the suggestions about Pell having killed sex in himself as a clue to a lack of empathy are just a bit odd, more particularly in the context of the fact that Pell had a notably masculine manner. He behaved with the self-confidence of someone who knew he was a Prince of the Church, but who also had the physical self-confidence of someone who might have been a sportsman. That supposed “uncertain empathy” does run the risk of coming across as the frustration, subsequently theorised, of a connoisseur of personalities who, rightly or wrongly, George Pell refused to talk to. But George Cardinal Pell was forever sending up his own temptations to imperial hauteur.

It’s worth remembering that when we are dismissive of religion we are being dismissive of a system which says, “What does it profit someone to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of their immortal soul?” And a system that has as the corollary of this, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” A penny-farthing atheism won’t prevail against this any more than the fabled gates of hell. And these fundamental tenets can be as truly held by an old-fashioned Christian like George Pell with his dogmatic view of faith and morals as the key to the kingdom as they can be by a liberal Christian who has the kind of nuanced view of mercy and different emotional attachments that we might associate with Pope Francis or indeed with the kind of Jesuit who would delight in showing you the re-designated rhyme: “I do not love thee, Dr Pell / The reason why, I cannot tell / But still I do not love thee, Dr Pell.”

It can’t have been much fun back in the day for Jesuits like Frank Brennan who went on to defend him during the trials with great analytical brilliance to receive letters from the Cardinal saying, “I doubt your Catholicity, Father Brennan.” And it’s not hard to see that George Pell could have been a bit more open to the way the Church has always been schooled by the world, even if it should not bow to it.

If you want another snapshot of the Cardinal try that unlikely source, Louise Milligan, whose Irish Jansenism seems marked:

…the first time I met George Pell, I was a cadet journalist and he was the Archbishop of Melbourne. He was dazzling … As I saw him leaving the Herald and Weekly Times building, I plucked up some courage and introduced myself. What happened next surprised me: Pell was utterly, utterly charming. He beamed a thousand watt smile. His eyes softened. He conversed with me for a few minutes. He seemed charismatic, but also, to my surprise, kind …

… that morning I got a glimpse of the man who would seduce prime ministers and newspaper editors, who would bedazzle not just parishes but dioceses, not just cardinals but popes. The sort of man who when his death was announced on Wednesday, Tony Abbott would describe as “a saint for our times”…

… the second time I met George Pell was in Rome in 2006 for the cross-handover ceremony for Catholic World Youth Day. Pell was there as the Archbishop of Sydney. In his fleeting encounters with the travelling press, he was surly and officious. He looked down at us with mild disdain, like we were an annoyance, a distraction.

It’s possible that people will be judged by the way they treat journalists but it’s interesting that in each of these prominent cases there is frustration at Pell failing to engage with them.

Milligan famously used her powers of fictionalisation—the imaginative power to depict, not necessarily untruthful—to present an extraordinarily damning portrait of Pell and an intensely sympathetic portrait of J as well as his friend and fellow chorister, dead from heroin, who made no accusation and in fact denied it to his mother. Milligan is very strong on people who have suffered post-traumatic stress. How quick J is to tears. She’s also sweepingly imaginative in a way that could be spellbinding if it were not so dangerous. Remember those ancillary charges the committal magistrate got rid of: the slinging boys across a crowded pool, to their delight, as a young priest in Ballarat; the story of the man who had supposedly seen George Pell with a group of young boys at Torquay in the 1970s, not bothering to get dressed in a hurry. If so, so what? As someone close to me who had copped Pell’s wrath when he had as a ten-year-old altar boy failed to put incense in a thurible said to me, “Back then it wouldn’t even have been thought of as creepy.”

He also said the infamous story—the object of so much outrage in the community—that George Pell had walked to the courthouse with Gerald Ridsdale, the most notorious of all the abusers, was in fact prima facie evidence that he could not himself have been an abuser. Pell later said he regretted it given the hubbub (or scandal) it caused but he also said, “That’s what we’re taught, isn’t it? To show kindness to sinners.”

More recently there were reports that there had been instructions from on high that he should take that walk. It’s fascinating that Pell seems often to be execrated for his tough-guy manner whereas one of his predecessors with a famously soft manner seems to have been rather more of an appeaser and talked of “charity” as he tipped people off that they might be caught and also moved them elsewhere in what would universally be condemned in the worst possible fashion.

George Pell was a man of notable magnetism. He was confident that he’d cracked the code of the sexual abuse horror in the 1990s. The charge made by David Marr that he’d initiated the Melbourne Response simply to save the Church money won’t bear serious consideration. There is always a “How long is a piece of string?” aspect to any form of compensation and Pell initiated one because he thought it was the right thing to do. It might have gone further but the impulse was just and kind and courageous. The automatic impulse to reject this way of looking at it is part of the whole conundrum. He pushed the Melbourne Response by himself but the rest of the bishops might well have been left dithering while Pell put his hand into his pocket. Did he fail to show empathy to the Fosters in a way that was sociopathic, as they said? When it comes to that situation, what price forgiveness? What compensation could possibly be achieved by empathy? How could it not fail?

Add to this that George Pell belonged to what Tim Fischer called the generation before the individualistic one. He was far more interested in justice being done than in justice appearing to be done, and he may to some extent have been let down by his high and mighty manner which for the first part of his career had stood him in such good stead. You could see him refusing to bow to the rainbow-sash gays or watch him from his cathedral pulpit inveighing against the strength of street-level marijuana and feel that with Pell you knew where you stood. He was so conservative that he even opposed IVF—in a way that perplexed some of his fellow conservatives—but he was a straight shooter. He supported the monarchy in Britain but thought Australia needed to become a republic according to the minimalist Turnbull/Keating model. He thought Trump was “a barbarian” but he was “our barbarian”.

It’s well to remember how extraordinary he was in battling Vatican financial skulduggery where money intended for the poor and the glory of God ended up in the hands of extraordinary and apparently crooked figures like Cardinal Becciu. Some of the stories about this were too good to be true. “I was not surprised by the sexual corruption,” Pell is reported to have said, “but I was flabbergasted by the financial corruption.” Even allowing for the hyperbole, it was all extraordinary, and the left-wing Saturday Paper commissioned an article on this because Pell’s activities as Prefect for the Secretariat of the Economy led him to resolve to get PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit the See of Saint Peter: an act which was so manifestly robust and courageous.

All of this is touched on in the three volumes of journals which the Cardinal wrote in prison. They are the record of a man trying to keep himself sane watching AFL and cricket and reading War and Peace and Hobbes’s Leviathan as well as the enjoyable detective stories by C.J. Sansom, historical whodunits about a sixteenth-century humanist sleuth who has lost his faith. The journals give ample evidence of what Robert Richter meant when he said George Pell was “a humorous man who was also a spiritual man”:

Graham Greene, the Catholic convert novelist, whose style I particularly admire, wrote poignantly of the coexistence in the same person of faith and sin, faith and weakness, as in the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory … Greene was given an honorary doctorate at Oxford in the same ceremony in which I was given my D. Phil in the Sheldonian theatre. He was a larger man that I had anticipated and sat there unmoving and expressionless as though he were taking it all in for his next novel.

It’s worth noting that reference to “faith and weakness”. The fact that the Cardinal was a very traditional Catholic does not mean that he had lost his sense of mercy. He talks toughly and appreciatively of the delights of watching all manner of American evangelists on television—and he’s nothing but ecumenical about this—and he will go from enthusing about sport (he says at one point that being in jail is nothing compared to the shame of losing the cricket to England) but he will also quote Teresa of Avila, “Lord, I do not ask for a lighter burden but a stronger spirit.” He will talk in an amiable humdrum way of the delights of being able to have a hot pastie, microwaved, with tomato sauce, and then go on to pray for people who are downcast, who live without hope, who are unable to see the good. He will ask especially that people who seem to walk in darkness should be able to see the light.

Each day’s journal ends with a prayer. Some of them, many of them, are like this: “God … give me strength and peace of mind and help my fellow prisoners especially those who are bad or disturbed or desperately unhappy.” He cherishes John Henry Newman on the Church: “that it not degenerate from its ancient glory, of zeal for God, and compassion for the oppressed”. The voice of the saintly Newman will blend with the Australian churchman and you can tell he pins his faith to the author of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua and A Grammar of Assent who was thought by James Joyce to be the greatest of all stylists in English. Everything he says is interesting and it’s presented without bombast. Part of the pleasure of reading these journals is that they present the “ordinary man” in George Pell as well as the remarkable one, though he believes that what he’s going through is nothing compared to what his redeemer suffered nor to the pain of those who have suffered abuse and who are insulted and injured.

He’s also fond of quoting Thomas More, who wrote: “The things, good lord, that I pray for, give me the grace to labour for.” It’s an eye-opener to see this very Australian, very down-to-earth man of God showing himself to be just that. But these journals of a man reading Tolstoy and watching sport are uncanny because of the variables they contain while also being unambiguously and disconcertingly prayerful. Here is the response of the man who might have played for Richmond, to news of the death, born of depression, of the former AFL St Kilda captain Danny Frawley:

The more I’m in jail, the more I miss being able to celebrate Mass. I knew him as a friendly teenager from my Ballarat years. I so much regretted not being able to offer mass for the repose of his soul and the consolation of his family. My own poor prayers are so inadequate in comparison with the consolation of the Eucharist. May he rest in peace.

He prays with great intensity “to keep hatred out of my heart”. He says of his accuser that he had “no enormous difficulty in forgiving him, recognising his sufferings”, and adds the words of his old mentor, Bishop O’Collins of Ballarat, “If you have hate in your heart you won’t do any good.”

When his Victorian appeal fails he is inevitably distressed and quotes that urgent prayer Domine ad adjuvandum me festina (Lord make haste to help me). He takes solace in the dissenting judgment of Mark Weinberg, which was such a powerful prolegomenon to Bret Walker’s defence before the High Court. Again, as with Richter, thank God for the Jews. He says at one point, “If a spiritual mediocrity like me can provoke gratitude or faith by a small kindness: well, anything is possible.” His constant prayer is, “Deliver me from jealousy and self-pity.”

Of course, there’s plenty of material in relaxed mode. He muses in characteristic fashion on the analogy between Christopher Wren’s Saint Paul’s in London and the MCG: he thinks they both look too much like concert halls when they’re empty, unlike the Sydney Cricket Ground which he thinks is always beautiful. He talks of the godliness of the great Bach passions. He cherishes Beethoven and he’s cheered when Richter assures him that the High Court “should not be strongly hostile to a pushy social conservative”. He will misquote Ezra Pound writing “there died a million”, whereas the quotation is actually a “myriad”. He quotes Hopkins’s “Glory be to God for dappled things” and Donne’s “Batter my heart, three personed God.” For someone who can seem lacking in doubt, George Pell was not lacking in humour or compassion or self-criticism.

It is one of the ironies of the publication of these books—a thousand pages in all—that they come with the recommendations of notable conservative Catholics, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and the media savant Bishop Robert Barron. They were inclined to imagine that Pell was made the victim of his own brand of conservative Catholicism, that he was martyred by his traditional belief in faith and morals which is in some contrast to Pope Francis’s liberalism and deliberate mercy. The truth is in fact weirder and sadder than that.

In practice two groups in Australia supported him, the lawyers and the liberal Catholics, who sometimes overlapped. The lawyers knew the charges should never have been laid: a former attorney-general said this to me and so did a vertiginously senior civil servant. They knew the charges were an exorbitant beat-up and in the case of the liberal Catholics they knew that the Catholic Church which had proffered an alternative education system to perhaps a third of the Australian community had an extreme visibility which magnified the perception of the abuse. They were not especially likely to have suffered from it despite the coven-like ghastliness of Ballarat at its worst. And they also knew that Pell—with all his bluffness, all his overweening sense of what he didn’t know was not knowledge—was a man of integrity. The Jesuits stopped saying, “I do not love thee Dr Pell”. Figures like Frank Brennan went in to bat for him.

It was clear that something weird had happened in Australia, a nation which had long ago dispensed with its old sectarianism and Protestant/Catholic wars—Malcolm Fraser, of all Ascendancy squatter types, had knighted Frank Little—but somehow the thing had gone into reverse. George Pell, who had counted people like Jim Wallace, the retired brigadier who was head of the Australian Christian Lobby, as a good friend as well as Peter Jensen, the former Anglican archbishop, saw the face of his own lofty forthrightness turned into the face of a man who disdained to bother with the assault on the innocent, indeed to allow it to run riot.

It was a slander, a terrible reversal of the truth. In the words of that great French diplomatist Talleyrand: “It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”

But George Pell’s journals, with their ordinariness, their humour and their devotion to the spiritual life, are the best antidote. Pell hoped that they might be of some use to the lukewarm, the agnostic, as well as the believers. After all, he said, they cried Hosanna even though Christ was riding a donkey.

Peter Craven is a Melbourne literary critic.