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The difficulty is not his privately-held heterodox views on climate change, but that Australia's most senior Catholic clergyman vigorously advances a position that could be interpreted as a statement of the official stance of the Catholic Church in Australia.
In a recent speech titled 'The Fall of the Christian West', American Cardinal Raymond Burke was concerned with Catholic identity. Questions about identity fix our attention on the group to which we belong, when Christian groups should instead begin by looking outwards.
Despite extensive welfare activities, Catholics have made only a modest contribution to public debate about the economic foundations of family life. Yet the Australian institution that is most associated in the public mind with 'pro-family' policies is the Catholic Church.
It would be regrettable if an attack by Cardinal Pell and the Australian Christian Lobby on the 'anti-Christian' Greens could be construed as an indirect shot across the bows of the atheist Prime Minister. On some policy issues the Greens have a more Christian message than the major parties.
Cardinal Pell, with whom I have voiced disagreement, preached superbly at the mass of thanksgiving after the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. 'She does not deter us from struggling to follow her.' As we wrestle with the common good, let's make a place for all our fellow citizens.
Social commentator Frank Furedi wrote that the Pope's UK visit provided Britain's cultural elite with 'a figure that it is okay to hate'. We might regard the angst as a manifestation of the growing pains that are to be expected in a world of emerging pluralism.
The annual Blake Prize for Religious Art has never been far from controversy. Works honoured this year include Sydney artist Rodney Pople’s Cardinal with Altar Boy, which is a provocative painting dealing with clergy sexual abuse. Its setting is the interior of a beautiful baroque church, and it portrays a headless prelate dressed in ecclesiastical finery, with an altar boy in his lap.
Throughout more than 30 years of killing and maiming in Northern Ireland, the media and governments maintained that the unrest was a political conflict. Though virtually everyone on one side was Catholic and those on the other were Protestant, nobody dared call it a religious war.
Gillard was photographed looking up to Cardinal George Pell with an admiring glance, and attended a fundraiser for expenses associated with October's Mary MacKillop canonisation in Rome. She offered $1.5 million in government money, but much more than that in flattery to Catholic electors.
In his Easter message, Cardinal George Pell made an oblique reference to sexual abuse in the Church. While most Australians dismiss such utterances as too little too late, it is possible to look at them optimistically when set against actions of the recent past.
Tony Abbott had a close association with B. A. Santamaria and personifies church ties with politics through his relationship with the man he has called his confessor, Cardinal Pell. The question is whether Abbott is a one-off or represents a larger group of Catholic Liberals.
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