Cardinal George Pell is an inviting subject for an extended essay. He is well-known, expresses strong views succinctly, and has equally strong admirers and detractors. That always guarantees a lively response.
David Marr is a splendid essayist, and his Quarterly Essay displays his habitual virtues. It is elegantly written, is structured around a strong and colourfully told story, and brings home powerfully the sufferings of the victims of clerical sexual abuse and the failures of the Catholic Church in meeting them.
It is unfair, but that is the nature of this kind of essay.
Marr follows the path of Pell from schooldays to seminary, study in Rome and Oxford, parish work and responsibility for Catholic education in Ballarat, through to his consecration successively as Auxiliary Bishop in Melbourne, Archbishop of Melbourne, Archbishop of Sydney, and Cardinal with strong connections in Rome.
He interweaves this story with the incidence and response to clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Pell was later accused of sexual abuse when he was a seminarian and the charge found unproven; he worked in the same circles as Gerald Ridsdale (the convicted child molester who abused children while working as a Catholic priest), met victims and heard accusations of clergy in his episcopal role, and introduced a framework for dealing with accusations and compensating victims in Melbourne.
The story Marr tells is of a man who was always committed to defend the Church and faith against its enemies, and whose main care was always to promote the church and its interests. He ruled his dioceses strongly, and consistently attacked what he saw as the evils of the day and the secularism from which they flowed. According to Marr, in dealing with sexual abuse his concern was to limit the exposure of the Church, and he displayed little empathy with victims.
Marr portrays Pell and the Church as terminally engulfed in the morass of sexual abuse, his campaign against the evils of secularist society now bereft of credibility. He sees his story as finally a tragedy flowing out of a blind commitment to celibacy.
The limitations of Marr's account are the obverse of its virtues. It is not a dispassionate judgment but a prosecution brief. It sifts Pell's motives and words but not those of his critics, and simplifies complexities. The details of the essay are designed to imply character. Churches are empty or full depending on the needs of the plot; Pell does not speak but booms. If a cock crows in a distant farmyard it crows for the Cardinal alone. This makes for engaging reading, but also asks for careful judgment.
As a Catholic priest I shall leave judgment on Marr's handling of Church sexual abuse to others more credible. But I am not convinced that the Royal Commission was seen as a cataclysmic defeat by Pell or other bishops, nor consequently that their agenda was quite as single-mindedly about control as Marr suggests.
Apart from Marr's concluding remarks about the effects of celibacy, which seemed to me gratuitous and to reflect Marr's own concerns more than Pell's, his account is confined to the public person. It is not empathetic. So it left me, as good essays should, asking a further question: what else must there be to explain the trust placed in Pell by bishops and popes, the responsible positions he has held, his hold on the popular imagination, the warm associations he has formed with so many significant Australians, the way in which he has polarised Catholics, and the directions in which he has wanted to take the Catholic Church in Australia?
To answer that question from the evidence that Marr provides, it may help to empathise with the vision that inspired Pell to become a priest. He was attracted to the warrior's dream of defending the Catholic Church and faith against its foes at a time of peril. In the 1950s the peril from Communism seemed real and the image of a persecuted church was resonant.
The single-mindedness of the warrior who leads people to war for a righteous cause can be an attractive one, especially to young men. In the Christian world it has been honoured in people like Athanasius, Thomas More and Joan of Arc, in secular terms in Bolivar and Mandela, and in sporting terms in indomitable players like Michael Voss and Darryn Lockyer.
In the 1950s Catholics could see Communism as an enemy. But in the churches that Pell came to lead, his identification of secularism as the enemy was not widely shared. Nor did many accept his diagnosis that the diminishment and discontents of the Catholic Church came from compromise with prevailing secular attitudes, reflected in disagreements over matters of faith and morals. But it is not difficult to see why he believed it.
Certainly he was right to recognise that the future of the Church could not be built on members of religious congregations or on the ageing educated Catholics who had been inspired by the Vatican Council. He saw the future to lie with younger clergy and with young Catholic leaders who shared his combative loyalty to the Church and identified with the struggle against secularism. He encouraged their growth.
Pell's vision and strategy were well received in Rome but they needed to be commended if they were to shape Australian church culture. That is always the challenge when fighting against the tide. Warriors seek followers and not a reflective community. They become impatient with people who seem to be half-hearted and to undermine the campaign.
But if a church culture is to be changed people need to be encouraged and persuaded. Indeed if Catholics feel disapproved of by their leaders they become timid and resentful. In Melbourne, at least, far too many Catholic conversations focused on the Archbishop and on his latest doings instead of focusing on what people could do without approval. These conversations took up all the oxygen that could have been used for living. Little changed.
If I imagine myself in Pell's position, I might be finally disappointed that after years of struggle, the city churches that he has led look so little different from the other capital city churches, and that the battle against secularism must now be fought from the lowlands of sexual abuse against artillery firing down from the high moral ground.
But as with other indomitable warriors I have great respect for a man who has shown such pertinacity and endurance in fighting a cause that has always been against the tide and the times.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.