This is Tess Livingstone’s second biography of George Pell. The first, George Pell: Defender of the Faith Down Under was published back in 2005, when the future horrors which were to befall him were unimaginable to anyone who had actually met him.
Yes, we all knew that he was hated by the establishment in Australia, both Catholic and non-Catholic. But none of us expected what came next.
This new book is an enlarged and expanded biography which takes in what I’m quite happy to call Pell’s white martyrdom and his sudden death. It’s every bit as dramatic as the man’s life was, so be prepared to come along for a lively ride.
Do read the introduction by George Weigel. It’s a cracker—a summary of everything that’s wrong in the church at its highest levels (and in Australia) and how the solitary figure of George Pell strode through it, continuing to exasperate and confound simply by the fact of his existence.
But I really think that you should buy it so that you can read about George Pell and get to know what he was really like.
Not the overblown bully-boy of the ABC’s imagining; not Tim Minchin’s sinister paedophile-adjacent creep; and not the malevolent conservative liturgy queen of ALP-voting Boomer Catholics’ nightmares.
The real George Pell was, in reality, one of the bravest men who ever lived. We should be proud to have had him effectively lead the church in Australia. Any other country would have been proud to have him as a cardinal.
But we know that now—and I’m sure I don’t need to rehash the way in which we found it out.
The book begins at the end with Pell’s death and funeral and then moves to an overview of the church he left behind him. This includes a review of the terrible mess known collectively as “Vatican finances.”
Not until chapter 5 do we start on the more conventional biographical content, starting with Pell’s origins as the son of a “mixed” marriage between a devout Irish Catholic woman and a card-carrying Church of England Ballarat publican.
This will be familiar ground to readers of Livingstone’s earlier work on Pell, as will the accounts of his time in the seminary, in Rome, in Campion Hall in Oxford, and then back to the humiliations of early parish work in rural Victoria.
One of my favourite episodes in Pell’s life will always be when he was put in charge of Corpus Christi seminary in Melbourne in June 1985. Corpus Christi had sunk to the point where apparently at least one entire graduating class of priests in the 1980s all subsequently left the priesthood.
Pell put up a notice entitled “A Few Small Changes,” including the restoration of daily Mass. Some seminarians started crying at their first collective meeting with him, and not from happiness.
Some of the staff and students treated Pell with rudeness and disrespect the entire time he was at Corpus Christi. I hope they remember this now.
I personally will always remember the night George Pell was made Archbishop of Melbourne, because I was there at the time, and sunk in despair about the state of the archdiocese.
That year of 1996 would feel like a turning point for me in the church’s history in Australia, and I think Livingstone’s biography supports this view.
But you will also find out things about George Pell from this book that perhaps you didn’t already know. Pell had a gift for friendship, and especially for instilling confidence in his friends rather than giving advice, which is an enviable gift.
He loved Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, but had doubts about his ability to choose good personnel.
He was intellectually brilliant—but unlike many bright people in the church today, he was also open-minded, well-read, an avid listener, and a welcomer of all comers who had something intelligent to say.
He had the increasingly rare gift of being able to hear both sides of an argument and find the best in both of them.
Pell read thrillers. He liked home-made steak and onions. In prison, he washed his socks in the shower. He was a theological and liturgical moderate—open to the Traditional Latin Mass movement, but not a particular adherent of that form of the Mass.
He loved homeless people and troubled souls and made the effort to befriend and assist them without fanfare. In Rome, he annoyed liturgical purists by praying in the canon of the Mass for his successors in the episcopate back in Australia.
Pell was also a man who copped a huge amount of flak, which means that he was usually directly over the target. His enemies often respected him more than his friends.
For example, many of his enemies made the effort to turn up to his funeral and pay him the tribute of standing outside and shouting. Some of his more prominent high-flying friends didn’t bother to show up at all.
This is a long book, and readers familiar with some of the earlier material might want to read selectively, even though it’s now been enhanced with updates. I think this biography forms a solid basis for understanding one of the most important and divisive figures in the twenty-first century church in Australia (although that’s a big call, as the century is still young).
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