Originally posted by the National Catholic Register

By Edward Pentin

Two years after Cardinal George Pell’s unexpected death, a new biography on the larger-than-life Australian Church leader has been published that promises to serve as a definitive historical record of the cardinal’s life and achievements.

Titled Cardinal George Pell: Pax Invictus (“Peace to the Unconquered”), a longtime friend of the late prelate and correspondent for The Australian newspaper, Tess Livingstone, has written a comprehensive and authoritative 38-chapter biography, including the many challenges Cardinal Pell faced during his last decades.

Building on Livingstone’s much shorter biography published in 2002 before he was made cardinal, Pax Invictus — words taken from an inscription on a Melbourne war memorial that Cardinal Pell had long admired — includes his early years in southern Australia as the son of a pub landlord when he aspired to be a professional Australian Rules Football player, as well as his formative time studying at Oxford University and the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome.

But this much expanded version from Ignatius Press now covers the many significant events that took place over the past 20 years, including what Livingstone describes as his “huge” work for the Vox Clara committee that helped guide the new English translation of the Roman Missal and his creation of the Domus Australia chapel and guesthouse in Rome that became one of his “favorite places” in the Eternal City.

Livingstone writes in detail about the well-known and pivotal role the cardinal played in reforming Vatican finances, including the many challenges he faced in the process, and the suffering he endured on account of a much-publicized miscarriage of justice in Australia that saw him spend 404 days in jail in 2019 and 2020 on false accusations of child sex abuse. “Looking back, it was so illogical,” Livingstone tells the Register. “It was so ludicrous.”

In an interview in a hotel lobby just a block away from the Brompton Oratory in central London, Livingstone shared with the Register that the updated book was set in motion by a phone call from Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, the head of Ignatius Press, who asked her to expand on her first edition. Cardinal Pell’s profile had “exploded” since then, she said, “so a lot has been added to those chapters.”

Livingstone emphasizes in the book Cardinal Pell’s resilience in the face of adversity and how his unwavering faith served as a source of strength throughout his trials. She also underlines how he offered his suffering for the victims of abuse and the Church itself, examines his leadership roles and his many achievements, such as significantly increasing numbers of seminarians and students in Catholic universities.

So what was George Pell really like? Who was the George Pell she knew?

“Very pastoral” is how Livingstone describes him, a priest who “emphasized the love of God” and “was not a judgmental person at all” but “as kind to the beggar on the street as he was to the conductor of the orchestra.”

A no-nonsense character with a giant frame, Cardinal Pell, in her view, was “deeply knowledgeable,” willing to engage on a “huge number of subjects” and with “very, very firm opinions,” especially on theology. He also was well known for his good sense of humor.

“He was full of tricks, and he could laugh at himself,” she recalls. “One of his brother cardinals once told him: ‘George, you can go at things like a bull in a china shop,’ to which he replied: ‘A bull in a china shop? More like the whole bloody herd!’”

Coming from a family that ran a small business, “he was very savvy with money,” Livingstone said, and that made him a natural choice to lead the Vatican’s financial reform. (Before Francis appointed him to that role, Benedict XVI had already tapped him early on his pontificate to be a member of a key Vatican financial committee).

When he arrived at the Vatican to lead the reform in 2014, Livingstone says, he fully subscribed to Francis’ goal of a Church to help the poor — but not Francis’ wish for a poor Church. What he wanted was “a better-managed Church,” she says, and his priority was for the Church’s finances to be used primarily for charity and for the poor rather than wasted on unnecessary bureaucracy. “He went in with a view to sort it out, to bring modern standards to the place — it was not an unreasonable idea, and initially it went well.”

But as has been widely reported in the Register and elsewhere, Cardinal Pell’s successes in reforming Vatican finances provoked fierce resistance from old-guard Vatican officials who had Francis’ ear. That internal opposition led to suspicions of collusion between anonymous figures in the Vatican and Australia to get him out of the way. “Certainly they were very pleased to see the back of him,” Livingstone says. “He really did a sterling job there and it made the old guard very uncomfortable.”

Livingstone documents that, already in 2013, over a year before Cardinal Pell came to the Vatican to begin his work on financial reform, the cardinal was the target of “Operation Tethering,” an investigation Australia’s Victoria police had launched into the cardinal without any specific allegations against him at the time. In 2017, the year of Pell’s arraignment to Australia, mysterious and unaccounted for fund transfers from the Vatican to Australia were made.

So, did certain figures in the Vatican perhaps learn about “Operation Tethering” and then use it for their own purposes to remove Cardinal Pell from the scene?

“That’s the theory,” she replies.

But Livingstone stresses that exactly what happened “is yet to be uncovered definitively.” Cardinal Pell himself suspected dark forces were at work. “He would have loved to see all that properly investigated,” Livingstone said. “He would also have liked a proper Royal Commission into what happened to the justice system in Victoria. It went wrong.”

Still, even after his full acquittal, Cardinal Pell continues to attract significant abuse about his record on handling sexual-abuse cases. Livingstone believes this is partly because Pell’s predecessors were unprepared to deal with the cases and that Pell was the first to tackle this “huge problem,” placing him in the firing line. Also, while his 1996 “Melbourne Response” was the world’s first such attempt to investigate and deal with abuse complaints, it drew criticism and had its “strengths and weaknesses,” Livingstone says. Then there was the fact that Melbourne and Ballarat, where Pell served, were centers of abuse, but she believes Pell “did his best in the circumstances.”

On the “trial of the century” that led to the conviction of Cardinal Angelo Becciu — seen as a key member of the “old guard” resistant to his reforms — and other defendants, Livingstone says he would be “pleased at the outcome” and would view it as a sign that Vatican finances “seem to be stabilizing” (the verdict coincidentally happened to be handed down on Dec. 16, 2023, the 57th anniversary of George Pell’s priestly ordination and the second anniversary of the death of his sister, Margaret). He would, nevertheless, still be frustrated that the Vatican’s first auditor general, Libero Milone, who was also pushed out by the “old guard” because he was uncovering corruption, has yet to receive justice. Pell was willing to defend Milone in court.

However, arguably his greatest concern involved false doctrine and, although he was loathe to describe himself as a “traditionalist,” he was adamant about defending the deposit of faith and upholding apostolic Tradition.

So what might Cardinal Pell make of the situation in today’s Church two years on, including key events that have taken place since his death?

His concerns about the state of the Church were no secret. In Pax Invictus, Livingstone unpacks the famous “Demos” memorandum, published in March 2022, that was highly critical of Pope Francis and the pontificate in general. She reveals it was partly composed by him but was a group effort, adding that his beloved uncle, Harry Burke, used to write to newspapers using the Demos pseudonym.

Today, Pell’s concerns would undoubtedly have grown. Livingstone says he would have considered the Synod on Synodality, often viewed as an attempt to weaken Church doctrine, to be “a complete waste of time,” adding that he “hated that synod process” and thought it was “totally on the wrong track.” She recalls his description of it in a scathing article he wrote in the U.K.’s Spectator magazine, published just after his death, as a “toxic nightmare” and a potpourri “outpouring of New Age goodwill.”

On other issues, Livingstone says the cardinal would have been “very pleased” to see Paris’ Cathedral of Notre Dame restored but “immensely irritated” that the Vatican’s controversial 2018 agreement with Beijing on the appointment of bishops was renewed on the feast day of Pope St. John Paul II last year. Pell was always “staunchly anti-communist,” Livingstone recalls, which is why he was “so angry about the China deal.” His great boyhood heroes, she points out, were 20th-century anti-communist fighters such as Croatian Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb and Hungarian Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, as well as today’s Chinese Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun.

Livingstone thinks Cardinal Pell would have been “very pleased” with Pope Francis’ decision to make Ukrainian Greek Catholic Mykola Bychok, eparch of Sts. Peter and Paul of Melbourne of the Ukrainians, a cardinal in December. But he also believed Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the current head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, should have been made a cardinal (he considered him a potential future pope) and that Archbishop Anthony Fisher, Pell’s successor in Sydney, “richly deserved” being elevated to the cardinalate. He would have been “disappointed” and “annoyed” that both have been overlooked.

As for other events that have happened since his death, such as Fiducia Supplicans that allowed non-liturgical same-sex blessings, his views are predictable, given his vociferous criticism of previous attempts to change the Church’s approach to sexual ethics. He would have wanted “freedom for those who offer and attend the traditional-Mass,” Livingstone says, and would think it was better to “recognize their strengths.” Cardinal Pell thought Benedict XVI’s funeral was “disgraceful” and that he did not “get a fair send-off,” given a poorly arranged liturgy and other issues. He was also concerned about the next conclave, Livingstone adds, especially as the “cardinals do not know each other, that they never come together.”

Overall, she predicts Cardinal Pell would view the Church as “in a bit of a holding pattern, very ready for some fresh leadership and someone really prepared to lead, even someone who’s prepared to make a few mistakes.” As a great admirer of Pope St. John Paul II, he would also want the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences returned to its former glory after being effectively gutted during the current pontificate. “He was very angry with what happened there,” she says.

As for her biography and her hopes for it, Livingstone takes a long view and sees it as providing a reliable historical record: “I think George Pell will go the distance like St. John Fisher. Cardinals who go to jail unfairly tend to go the distance where others have fully forgotten them. And so I hope, in 400 years, people will look back on who this Pell fellow was, the man who wrote these journals when he was in jail. And then there’s a biography which they can read. Maybe a priest will come along and do the big official, churchy theological biography as well, but I hope this book goes the distance.”

But Livingstone doesn’t see it as a tribute. “I just wrote it for what it was,” she says. “A great story, but I think he comes out of it very well.”

“George Cardinal Pell” Book is available to purchase here

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