DAVID MARR
Quarterly Essay, Issue 51, 2013
Black Inc., $19.99 (pb)
The police had, writes David Marr in his Quarterly Essay on paedophile priests in
the Catholic Church in Australia, “vigorously, for a very long time, protected
the church”, leaving the clergy’s sex crimes to be looked after in-house. This entirely suited the clerical child
abusers until the international tide of Catholic sexual abuse revelations
engulfed Australian shores and sparked police of conscience into action.
In 2012, police whistleblowers in Victoria and New South
Wales linked dozens of adult suicides to clerical child sexual abuse and
accused the church of protecting paedophile priests, hindering investigations,
destroying evidence, silencing and discrediting victims, and moving guilty
priests to fresh pastures and fresh crimes.
Community outrage prompted the then Federal Labor government
to call a Royal Commission into institutional sexual abuse, a judicial inquiry
of which even Tony Abbott, the then Liberal Opposition leader and Catholic
hard-liner, approved, noting a poll showing 95% popular support for a
full-throttled inquiry.
For Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s No. 1 Catholic,
deserted by his political and police allies, the challenge was immense. His failure to rise to it is no surprise,
says Marr, of the young Ballarat Catholic who fell under the 1950s spell of B.
A. Santamaria, the anti-communist, anti-Labor, anti-union, Catholic
extremist. Pell’s subsequent seminary
training established his reputation for rigid orthodoxy, unquestioning
obedience to Rome, and ideological and physical bullying.
Pell’s loyalty and conservatism impressed the Pope, who
promoted Pell up the clerical career ladder.
Priests raping trusting and defenceless altar boys did not disturb the
Catholic moralist’s gaze which remained fixed on the Vatican-ordained sex
crimes that really mattered -
homosexuality (‘a much greater health hazard than smoking’), masturbation,
pre-marital and extra-marital sex, abortion, contraception, ‘mail-order
divorce’.
Where sexual abuse by priests could not be ignored, it could
be ‘treated’ by prayer, or, in a display of Christian virtue, forgiven. Offending clergy, wrapped in the protective
mystique and aura of the priesthood, were deemed scared persons, Christs on
earth, and not, therefore, subject to secular law or police handcuffs.
Secular justice was not the only temporal trouble that Pell,
the Vatican’s man in Australia, had to repel.
Second only to the threat of communism was ‘secular liberalism’. In Australia, and from his powerful Vatican
posts, Pell opposed a charter of human rights, heroin injecting-rooms, ‘the
climate change bandwagon’, the Greens, gay adoption and other ‘progressivist’
transgressions.
One merit of the earthly world, however, was its public
treasury coffers from which Pell, heading the Catholic education business, demonstrated
a remarkable talent for extracting money, winning federal funding for sectarian
higher education institutions.
The High Court of Australia, too, gave its lay blessing to
the Church, deeming the Church’s property trusts, where it had parked its
immense, tax-free wealth and assets, as unable to be held responsible for the
sexual conduct of Catholic priests.
Australia thus remains “the only country in the common-law world where
the Catholic Church cannot be sued” because it is “just an association of
believers with no corporate entity, rather like a mothers’ club or a bridge
circle”, its legally-quarantined riches off-limits to potential litigants.
Pell’s non-spiritual concern for Church finances had earlier
been on miserly display, whilst archbishop of Melbourne, with the so-called
‘Melbourne Response’, a private church tribunal with all the trappings but none
of the power or independence of a royal commissioner. This process catalogued 304 proven complaints
against sixty priests in Melbourne but not a single case was referred to
police.
The victims, in return for secrecy, received payouts averaging
a mere $32,500, the only compensation alternative being a long and financially
exhausting battle through the real courts.
Compared to an average Catholic child sexual abuse settlement of $1
million in the US, Pell saved his church in Australia hundreds of millions of
dollars.
If the sex crimes, their cover-up and bargain basement
hush-money had not trashed the Catholic brand by now, Pell’s stumbling attempt
to deflect blame in response to the announcement of a Royal Commission
would. Pell’s contempt for the media and
its ‘disproportionate and repetitious’ reporting of the sex crimes of the
clergy surfaced in spades with Pell portraying his Church as the victim of
journalists.
Marr’s case against Pell is convincingly, and elegantly,
made – he communicates ideas and anecdotes clearly and concisely, with his
moral tone set to coolly incandescent. Marr, however, could have been more
analytical. His focus on Pell, and on
enforced priest celibacy, as the root of Church paedophilia, tends to subordinate a broader and more theoretical
examination of the role of Catholic Church material interests,
authoritarianism, democratic unaccountability and theology in the criminal
behaviour of the powerful men of religion.
Marr is right, however, to warn of the danger posed by the
current conjunction of the two most powerful and reactionary Catholics in
Australia, both ‘Movement’ men from the Santamaria tradition – the Prime
Minister, Tony Abbott, and his spiritual adviser and close friend, Cardinal
George Pell. What further Catholic
abuses and scandals lie in wait?
