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