Quarterly Essay 51 The Prince by David Marr

Author:David Marr [Marr, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Politics, Biography, Writing, History
ISBN: 9781863956161
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18529572
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2013-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

CARDINAL

A large figure in purple climbed out of a black stretch Ford. Anarchists jeered. Charismatics sang “Hallelujah.” George Pell had come to be installed in his new cathedral. He was armed for trouble. On the way over he had paused at the tomb of Mary MacKillop to pray for “help and protection.” She did not desert him now. Nor did the police. They arrested five members of Community Action Against Homophobia for swearing, assault and breaches of the peace. They were chanting, “Shame, Pell, shame,” and waving placards that read: “Get your rosaries off our ovaries.” Their target wished everyone in the forecourt of St Mary’s Cathedral “without exception” his best wishes and made for the doors and the waiting trumpets. Inside, the Catholic Church was in triumphal mode: all the bishops of Australia and hundreds of priests packed onto stack-away chairs. It looked like a church without a trouble in the world. Pell made his way down the nave, moving in deliberate slow motion to the anthem “Behold a Great Priest, Who in His Days Pleased God.” Present also were ranks of secular VIPs, including the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition. The apostolic nuncio presented instructions from the pope to administer his new diocese in a “vigilant and efficacious manner” in order that the people of Sydney may “demonstrate openly their love of the mother church.” The old cardinal sat the new man in a large red chair and gave him a gold crook. The place filled with singing. Then Pell got down to business: calling on history, pleading for vocations, mocking Sydney’s pretensions to be at the cutting edge of sin: “One or two local writers seem to suggest that sin is a recent Sydney invention; ‘Sin City’ or ‘Tinsel Town’ has a contemporary local resonance! However, human weakness flourishes in other parts of Australia and … human perfidy is as old as the Garden of Eden.”

The installation of Pell in late March 2001 marked the arrival of a big, and perhaps turbulent, civic presence. He was, however, dealing with a different town and a different church. This was not Santamaria territory. New South Wales and its hierarchy had sided against Pell’s kind of Catholic. That history wasn’t forgotten. Pell didn’t yet have the networks, the alliances. He threw himself into politics with familiar energy and fair success: he helped hold the line on euthanasia while losing on embryonic stem-cell research. Everything was going well. Down south, fresh news of clerical sex crimes kept breaking but in Sydney this was hardly reported. It was as if he had left the scandal behind. Walking Ridsdale to court was the only detail the public knew that touched his reputation and he had explained that slip years ago. In early 2002, when the Boston Globe published the first, best exposé in the world of how the Catholic Church covered for paedophile priests, Pell was frank but reassuring. The lessons had been learnt, all was well now, but there

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