Pax Invictis by Tess Livingstone: the life and legacy of Cardinal George Pell

For those alive today, the legacy of George Pell will be forever marked by, or even defined by, the travesty of justice he endured at the hands of the legal system in the Australian state of Victoria. Victoria was Pell’s home state, and the appalling treatment he suffered there should alert us to a little-acknowledged element in the reality of his adult life: for all his eminence and rank, he was largely an outsider. To many in both his homes, the Church and Australia, the courage of Pell’s convictions was at the very least unsettling. Many did not want to hear him.

Indeed, there seemed generally to be something of Georgius contra mundum about him, and Pell often found himself if not lonely then isolated. Arguably this was most obvious in his Vatican appointment to the Secretariat of the Economy by Pope Francis in 2014. In line with his avowed mission to reform the papal curia, Francis appointed a man whom he surely knew was principled yet experienced in the realities of ecclesiastical administration, loyal but no toady, a doer rather than a mere talker, dogged and dauntless if at times too unyielding, and impervious to either blandishments or threats. As Francis told an unnamed bishop: “He’s an honest man.” Too honest, perhaps.

Such a person is likely to be met with at least ambivalence in most places. In his foreword to Tess Livingstone’s book, George Weigel points to the papal treatment Pell faced from 2014. Having displayed reformist credentials, Francis bolstered them in appointing Pell to confront the tangled web of Vatican finances. Both Pope and prefect were curial outsiders, and both appeared to be men who would brook no nonsense. Weigel notes that the outsider Pell had two options as he entered the curial lions’ den: to go slowly and try to win over the recalcitrant, or to “put the pedal to the floorboard” and get as much done in what might be, and was, a small envelope of time. Unsurprisingly, Pell chose the latter course: silky ingratiation was not his line.

This choice was based, says Weigel, on the assumption that Francis was as serious in intent as Pell in reforming Vatican finances, and that Pell would therefore have unstinting papal support. Yet it became patchy; in practice some of Francis’s decisions empowered the recalcitrant and undermined his own appointee, his fellow outsider, as Livingstone reveals. Pell was an outsider even to the Pope himself, and never a part of the parallel court that Francis created between himself and the established curia. Pell, who was no yes-man, found himself left holding a poisoned chalice alone: an outsider to both the old and the new papal curiae, and increasingly a target.

As Livingstone’s second, comprehensively updated, edition of her 2002 biography proceeds, Pell the outsider emerges clearly to view. Pell was betrayed in the very heart of the Church to which he had committed his life, and he was betrayed in the land of his birth by a society of which he was a proud son. He was loyal to both, yet never able to accommodate himself to the foibles and failings of either. We see that he had friends, good and loyal, but perhaps too few of them where he very often needed them most.

Livingstone is clearly an admirer of Pell, as would anyone be who takes care to examine his life and legacy objectively; her book allows that life and legacy to be better known. It is rarely a critical biography, and even tends towards the hagiographical occasionally, but what she presents of Pell’s life and work justifies her positive approach. Given the poisonous pens of several Australian journalists, whose books on Pell are at best hatchet jobs and at worst brazen calumnies, it was imperative that a more gracious, generous and complete record of Pell’s life and legacy would, and should, emerge.

One aspect of Pell’s ministry that escapes the notice of too many was his significant role in Catholic education, and Livingstone devotes serious space to his activity at all levels of this important concern. She offers a corrective to the more monochrome portraits of Pell as little more than a culture warrior or conservative curmudgeon. He could be creative and effective in his educational reforms. When it comes to priestly formation in seminaries, he proved to be bold and decisive – and thus inevitably divisive. Divisive need not be a pejorative term – Judgment Day will be the pinnacle of divisiveness, after all – and Pell’s divisiveness was principled and medicinal. Perhaps his medicine might have gone down better with a little more sweetness added, but Pell did not do saccharine.

Livingstone begins with Pell’s death, which becomes the backdrop for the life she lays out in the following chapters. The Pell who emerges from these pages is clearly lion, scapegoat and sacrificial lamb. Necessarily, Livingstone devotes significant time to the legal travesty that befell him. In a way the saga was his ultimate making, if seen in Christian terms. Livingstone gives the narrative of the injustice meted out to Pell in his last years the air it needs to expose the naked absurdity of his prosecution.

The only manifest winners in the debacle were, in an unintended way, Pell himself (who clearly grew in holiness) and the High Court of Australia, which struck a blow for impartiality and objectivity in the Australian legal system. The biggest losers were the police and judiciary in the Australian state of Victoria, save for Justice Mark Weinberg’s lone voice of reason in his dissent from the rejection of Pell’s first appeal. Victims of clerical sexual abuse were also dealt a serious blow by a legal system intent not on obtaining justice for them, but on its obsession to “get Pell”.

Livingstone does justice to Pell’s life and legacy. A good complement to her book is Frank Brennan SJ’s slim but powerful 2021 book, Observations on the Pell Proceedings. Fr Brennan, a capable lawyer from an eminent legal family, and an articulate social-justice warrior, was no confederate of Pell’s; they clashed often. Yet Brennan reminds us that disagreement should never override the charity that objectivity protects. He smelt the rat in Pell’s prosecution early on, and his forensic but accessible analysis of the proceedings against Pell, coming from a different direction, validates Livingstone’s.

In confirming Livingstone’s work, Brennan reminds us that in the context of the Pell case Christians should recall the abiding danger of the mob and malicious actors. “The time has come,” he writes, “to attest that Pell worked tirelessly and to the best of his ability from 1996 to put right the dreadful consequences of institutional child sexual abuse. Pell faced charges which were false, a prosecution that was malicious, a Victorian appeal court which failed to administer justice according to law in the face of a baying crowd, a media campaign which was relentlessly prejudiced, and royal commission findings which demonstrably failed to accord natural justice.”

The George Pell revealed in Livingstone’s biography brings home with force the crown and the cost of Christian fidelity in a hostile world.

Dom Hugh Somerville-Knapman is a monk of Douai Abbey. Pax Invictis is published by Ignatius Press (£23.99)

The post Pax Invictis by Tess Livingstone: the life and legacy of Cardinal George Pell first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Pax Invictis by Tess Livingstone: the life and legacy of Cardinal George Pell appeared first on Catholic Herald.