Choose your Pell
By Greg Spearritt
The Australian news media present no shortage of options for ways to view the life of the erstwhile Cardinal George Pell. While no-one doubts he was influential, powerful and controversial, how you view him otherwise might just depend on who you read.
If you’re a consumer of the Murdoch media, you’ll find:
- a life lived for the Church and its founder
- a man of “brave faith”
- a Christian “gentleman”
- a “great teacher”, “inspirational” and “a saint for our times” (and here)
- an undeserving victim of the media (and here)
- a man unfairly targeted for his work in ‘cleaning up’ the church
- a generous friend
- the victim of “one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Australian history”
- unfairly denied a state funeral
- a man with a mixed legacy
If you read the Nine media and The Guardian Australia, you’ll see:
- a divisive and polarising Catholic (and here)
- a hard-ball church politician who won few fans
- defender of a conservative Catholicism that was ‘out of touch’
- one who (anonymously) condemned Pope Francis’s papacy as a “disaster” and a “catastrophe”
- a climate denialist out of step even with the Catholic Church
- a key strategist behind the ‘Ellis defence‘, choosing the institution over children’s lives
- the subject of an ongoing civil action for child sexual abuse
- dogged by scandal, with a fatally damaged reputation
- deeply associated with child sexual abuse by clergy (and here)
- ultimately insincere in apologising for child sexual abuse in the church
ABC reporting presents a Pell who was/is
- an ongoing source of distress for victims of child sex abuse
- one who failed to adequately address child sexual abuse
- “ahead of the game” on responses to child sexual abuse
- a man accused “of covering up clerical child abuse and lacking compassion for survivors”
- pugnacious and combative
- viciously treated by the media
- a rough but talented AFL player in his younger days
- an absolutist who saw the Church as infallible, unchanging and ‘outside history’
- one who brought accountability to Vatican finances
- a “great gospel man”
- out of step on social issues
- a man with a mixed legacy (and here)
Make what you can of all that!
Disclaimer: views represented in SOFiA blog posts are entirely the view of the respective authors and in no way represent an official SOFiA position. They are intended to stimulate thought, rather than present a final word on any topic.
Photo: Pell in 2012, by Kerry Myers, CC-by-2.0
