“I hope he rots in hell!” shouted the voice on the phone.
He was furious with me for my defence of Cardinal George Pell, who at that time (this was a couple of years ago) faced the worst imaginable legal and personal persecution.
My caller made it clear that he loathed Christianity equally. I kept quiet, though tempted to congratulate him for hanging on to at least one element of the faith: his apparent belief in the possibility of eternal punishment.
I could have added that if he ended up there himself, he might be surprised to find that the cardinal was somewhere else. But I let it go.
There’s no point arguing the toss with a man whose raging heart is filled with hate.
The truth is that many people in our community are so enraged by the sexual abuse of children that they will turn remorselessly on anyone accused of it, without regard for the rules of evidence.
The fact that Pell was found innocent on appeal in the highest court in Australia cuts no ice with such people: some lawyers—who ought to have known better—even said that Pell deserved to be punished, regardless of his guilt or innocence, of the charges brought against him ... because of the “likelihood” of his involvement in similar cases.
And such it was that presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and all the ancient safeguards relating to rules of evidence that have been won for us by past generations, collapsed before the onslaught of ignorant prejudice.
At his funeral Mass in Sydney, people thanked God for Pell’s life and witness, and prayed for the repose of his soul.
Inevitably there were demonstrations. A friend of mine (not a Catholic) who was there spoke of “the rabble’s scurrilous and hate-filled chants,” and in an interesting aside he noted that almost all the protesters were evidently of European stock, while the majority of the clergy and choristers were clearly not.
Wakeup call to Woke readers: in modern Christianity, it seems, white males are no longer the dominant players.
Firm With a Sense of Duty
I knew Cardinal Pell, though not well. We weren’t close mates, but I worked with him on occasions, met him many times socially and professionally—and I liked him. I found him warm, kind, wise, and sometimes very amusing.I suppose anything’s possible in this world, but the notion that Pell might have been some kind of sexual predator is so far down my list of possibilities as to be off scale. I cannot imagine how anybody who actually knew him could possibly entertain such an idea.
But for all those good qualities I knew and admired, I think it’s fair to say that Pell wouldn’t have thrived in the diplomatic corps.
A strong sense of duty, a tough-minded commitment to orthodoxy, and a dedication to true justice are not generally regarded as loveable qualities in a secular world, but they led Pell to be among the first bishops to set about cleaning up the stinking dung-heap of paedophilia and to initiate a scheme for compensating its victims.
So why is this ignored? Why did people hate him so much and even now, after his death, continue to revile his memory?
Firstly, because he was a very firm and tough administrator. He took action against his Melbourne seminary (which he judged unfit for purpose) by accepting—against their expectations—the proffered resignations of staff and losing no time appointing replacements.
Now “firm” administrators are called “ruthless” by those they’ve offended and are never, never forgiven.
A Convenient Outlet for Our Sins
A much more important factor in his unpopularity was his outspoken and unrelenting opposition to abortion. He pulled no punches: abortion, he claimed, was the worst form of child abuse.Nothing could have been better calculated to offend the wider world. The killing of unwanted children, either before or after birth, has always been regarded as evil not only by the Christian church but by other faiths as well.
Even pagans see it as contrary to the “natural law,” which is why in the ancient world, unwanted babies were exposed or left to die. Their excuse for this was a sort of theological fiction: that it was better to leave them to the gods to save if they wanted them than to directly kill them.
But this is not something modern secularists want to hear.
So many of us have had some association with abortion: we’ve known poor women who dread having another mouth to feed, or bullied women who fear the anger of their parents or their boyfriends and lovers, or women who are victims of incest or rape; or women (and their partners) who cannot face bringing up a severely handicapped baby.
All those who terminate a child are under pressure of some kind.
Pell’s Church teaches that abortion is always a sin and is, therefore forgivable.
God alone knows the secrets of our hearts. None of us can really understand the reasons why a woman might go ahead with it; it is not for us to judge.
But if we accept the hypothesis, at least for the moment, that abortion is contrary to the “natural law” and that mothers instinctively sense that it is wrong, there are two possible consequences: they will either suffer remorse afterwards, or they will go into denial by defending and justifying their actions.
If the latter option prevails, it is a simple transition to transfer their feelings of guilt to others. They need to believe, for their own peace of mind, that there are worse sins than their own.
This largely explains why so many people express a visceral loathing of paedophilia that appears out of all proportion to their reaction to other forms of child abuse.
We know that millions of children die every year of hunger and unsanitary water. We know that many of the world’s 40 million slaves are children.
We know that late-term abortion is nothing other than infanticide and that it is done with great cruelty. We know (if we trouble to look) that in several jurisdictions, abortion is permitted up to natural birth and that babies who somehow survive are not resuscitated but left to die.
We know all these things, yet our focus is elsewhere.
They don’t fill the headlines. They don’t outrage us.
On the whole, we’d rather not hear about them.
But Pell is and was, in every sense, a big target. Condemn him to Hell in our tiny minds, and like the scapegoat of old, he takes away all our guilt and makes us feel righteous again.
