CARDINAL The Rise &
Fall of George Pell – The Inside Story
Louise Milligan (2017) FREE POSTAGE TO ANYHERE IN
AUSTRALIA $35
"Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell" is a
highly acclaimed, award-winning investigative book by journalist Louise
Milligan. It details the ascent and controversies of Cardinal George Pell,
formerly Australia’s most powerful Catholic and treasurer of the Vatican. The
book and associated journalism critically examine his life and the fallout from
the
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses To Child Abuse.
Key Themes and Coverage
Louise Milligan is a credit to Australian journalism, and
Cardinal is the culmination of her finest work.
It is one thing for the rest of us to do our best to turn
a journalistic light on issues that concern us. But very few journalists have
devoted the kind of time Louise has, in such a supremely difficult field, with
such dark forces arrayed against her, and still managed to shine a light so
brilliantly with such powerful effect.
Cardinal deals with a controversial subject and is
written with great sensitivity and care.
Louise’s efforts have been richly acknowledged.
Table of Contents
I first meet The Kid at a local RSL. An unprepossessing
place, of mission-brown bricks, set back on a treeless lawn from a grimy
street. Inside, it’s lit with a green fluorescent glare. Grey carpet, slightly
sticky red vinyl chairs, walls adorned with military crests, fighting guns and
lists of the dead. A television blares sport in the corner. And, in the middle
of the ceiling, among it all, glitters a single, incongruous disco ball.
The Kid loves this place. He’s working the bar. He’s of
medium build, not tall, with big chocolate-drop eyes framed with curling
lashes. He has...
There he is, always in the middle of the back row. The
eyes inevitably find their way to him. He is tall and he is handsome, towering
above the others. He’s rarely smiling, but then again, almost none of them are.
His shoulders are broad, his hair shining and meticulously swept to the side.
His eyes are wide set, clear chips of blue ice. Many of the others look like
typical teenage boys—a little gormless, perhaps a bit pimply, with that
pubescent thing where their teeth are ever so slightly too big for their heads.
They’re the sons of...
Ultimately, Ballarat was too small for George Pell and
could scarcely contain his ambitions. As he launched into his forties, Pell’s
positions mirrored those of the fabulously charismatic, theologically
conservative Pole, Karol Wojtyla, who had been elected as Pope John Paul II in
1978. And so Pell, who continued to cultivate his Roman contacts, was being
noticed. ‘By 1985 it was Ballarat’s turn to provide a rector for the [Corpus
Christi] seminary. George got the job—another good career step,’ Father Eric Hodgens,
who is older than Pell, remembers. So, Pell set off to Melbourne, the
archdiocesan jewel in the...
When the Most Reverend George Pell was still Auxiliary
Bishop of Melbourne, he had the passing acquaintance of a priest in his region
called Father Noel Brady. Brady is now parish priest at Resurrection Kings
Park, a thriving western suburbs community where he ministers to a distinctly
multicultural group of worshippers. He is an understated man and he blanches
from any colourful descriptors of Pell or indeed of Pell’s motives. Brady says
he prefers to stick to the facts. And the facts he alleges fly in the face of
everything Pell now says about what he knew about paedophilia and...
The announcement in July 1996 that Pell had become
Archbishop of Melbourne was a huge surprise to the priests of the city. It was
no secret that many of them did not care for his style. It was equally apparent
that Pell himself was unburdened by this and felt that he should get on with
reforming an archdiocese which he considered to be foundering under Frank
Little.
Terry Laidler, who had by then long left the priesthood,
was doing the evening shift on Melbourne’s ABC local radio talkback station,
then known as 3LO. After the fax carrying the announcement of...
The percolating child abuse crisis was to be much harder
to fix than dumping the staff of a seminary or cleaning out one’s ideological
or theological adversaries from Church bodies. The media was going after the
issue in a big way. The victims were becoming emboldened. It was becoming a
dominant narrative: terrible PR for a Church whose mass attendance numbers were
already in freefall. It was potentially costly in terms of compensation
payouts. And in 1996, it was unclear just how many priests Pell as archbishop
might lose to criminal prosecutions, but suffice to say they were falling
over...
If Pell’s handling of the Melbourne Response upset his
fellow bishops, it had absolutely zero impact on his standing in Rome. The
Archbishop of Melbourne continued, with the Pope’s blessing, his ideological
crusade. A key example of that mission was his handling of the ‘Rainbow Sash’
movement—a group of gay Catholics who wanted more acceptance from their Church.
That acceptance was not forthcoming from Pell and matters came to a head on
Pentecost Sunday, 31 May 1998. A group of Rainbow Sash protesters turned up to
St Patrick’s Cathedral, where a confirmation mass was taking place. They said
their...
I went to see Father Bob Maguire many years later to
discuss what happened to Phil Scott when he came up against George Pell. By
that time, Maguire had long been ‘managed out’ of the Catholic Church by Pell’s
successor and old ally Denis Hart. I went to Maguire’s office in South
Melbourne. Maguire doesn’t have a parish any more—they took that away from him.
Instead he inhabits this ramshackle shopfront, where he runs his charity. I sat
and waited for him on a nineties plaid armchair covered in dog hair from
Maguire’s poodle. Eventually, the priest called me...
For many years, the memory of the Southwell Inquiry fell
away. In the mid-2000s, His Eminence Cardinal George Pell resumed his position
as what the priests somewhat disparagingly referred to as Captain Catholic.
One of Pell’s first tasks in coming back on the job in
Sydney was behind the scenes, a rather troublesome matter of a John Andrew
Ellis. Ellis had made a complaint to the archdiocese of abuse by a Father Aidan
Duggan, who had been a priest at Christ the King parish at Sydney’s Bass Hill,
among other locations.
Duggan had for a time worked in Scotland at...
In 2012, two things happened in the Australian media that
lobbed grenades into the Church’s power structures and, in the process,
straight at the nation’s most senior Catholic, George Pell. They both concerned
country cops who could no longer bear the burden of picking up the pieces of
child sexual abuse in their districts.
The first cop put together for the first time a series of
suicides, principally in Pell’s home town of Ballarat. The second was a police
officer from New South Wales who came forward with what he knew. He had nothing
really to do with Pell, but...
On the final night of February in the leap year of 2016,
a sleek car delivered a septuagenarian to Il Quirinale, the highest of Rome’s
seven hills. Il Quirinale is home to the Italian presidential palazzo. The
septuagenarian who walked through the softly falling rain into the 4-star Hotel
Quirinale was not a president, nor a pope, although at times he did have a
rather majestic way about him. He was Cardinal George Pell, Prefect for the
Secretariat for the Economy in the Holy See. And to put it extremely mildly,
his presence was highly anticipated.
From the moment George Pell’s midnight-blue Volkswagen
slid down Via Nazionale and pulled up at the Hotel Quirinale slightly before 10
p.m. on the first day of the Italian spring, the Roman night was abuzz with
expectation. The Cardinal had met that day with Pope Francis. And as he strode
into the hotel, it was clear that the meeting had gone rather well. ‘Cardinal
Pell! Did you meet with the Pope today? What did the Pope say?’ a reporter
called out to him from the media pack as he entered. The Cardinal did not turn
around, but he waved his...
Pursing her lips and shaking her head as she watched
Pell’s evidence live from her home near Bendigo in Australia was a woman named
Donna Cushing. She had grown up Donna Harrison, the eldest of seven siblings.
Her brother Mark Harrison was also watching Pell’s evidence. He’d travelled to
Rome with the survivors. It was a big step for Mark, who has never spoken
publicly about what happened to him and has struggled with it all his adult
life. Mark decided it was time to finally break his silence and spoke with me
about what happened.
Incongruously, the approach to the town of Mortlake along
the Hamilton Highway, in the middle of far-western Victoria, begins with an
Avenue of Honour. The Monterey cypresses were planted for the fallen soldiers
after the Great War, and now provide a thick canopy with patches of sunlight
glinting through. ‘Mortlake: Australia’s Olivine Capital,’ a peeling sign
declares, bearing a picture of a peridot, the gemstone that olivine becomes.
Every country town has to be capital of something. For Mortlake, it’s a rockforming
mineral and, though not advertised on the roadside, for a short but bleak
period at the start of...
To examine what George Pell really knew during his time
as a consultor of the Ballarat Diocese, you have to take a forensic look at the
state of knowledge of those around him. One of the most instructive figures to
examine is Brian Finnigan. At the time he gave his public evidence to the Royal
Commission in December 2015, Finnigan was Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane. But for
many years, Finnigan had been a priest in the Ballarat Diocese, and a friend of
Pell’s, and although they haven’t seen each other for a few years, the Cardinal
says they remain friends...
Fast-forward several decades on from Pell’s years in
1970s Ballarat and what he might or might not have known as a priestly
consultor, and you land with a jolt in a modest motel room in the central
western New South Wales town of Wagga Wagga. On 26 August 2009, a 47-year-old
man punched two holes on either side of the bearings in his motel room and
hanged himself with his belt. The suicide was a jolting shock to everyone that
Wayne Brennan knew. Wayne was a successful businessman whose company had been subcontracted
to do a big building project
If, as they say, an ordinary city has six degrees of
separation, Ballarat has one or two. And hence, Wayne Brennan, a chippie by
trade, was known around the traps by Rob Walsh, also a carpenter. And of
course, both of them as children knew George Pell. Walsh was also involved in
Operation Plangere—the report that has been used to discredit those that seek
to highlight the extent of the child abuse problem in the Victorian Catholic
Church and thus a weapon used by those who feel that Pell has been unfairly vilified.
In the history wars battled in...
However many times it’s said he turned a blind eye in
Ballarat, however many child abuse problems it’s alleged he mopped up after,
George Pell remained at that time a reasonably junior priest. But the questions
about his conduct in relation to the handling of child abuse in Melbourne
happened when he was an auxiliary bishop. Talk to people in the know in the
Church and they will tell you Melbourne is Pell’s real problem. The Melbourne
problem was forensically prosecuted on the third day of Cardinal Pell’s evidence
beamed back from Rome to Sydney in February 2016.
There were many, many attempts to get someone to listen
to the fact that Father Peter Searson was dangerous, decades before Julie
Stewart and Graeme Sleeman ever came to the Royal Commission. Infamously now,
one of those attempts was by a delegation in November 1989 of Doveton parent
and teacher representatives who went to see the Auxiliary Bishop responsible
for the region, George Pell. A list of grievances which had been prepared
included ‘harassment of children’, and a range of unsettling issues like hanging
around the kids’ toilets, showing children a dead body in a coffin, forcing
children to attend...
For an almost 75-year-old man, George Pell’s forensic
nineteen-and-a-half hours of evidence to the Royal Commission, slogged out over
four nights into the small hours of four Roman mornings, was no small feat.
Particularly for a man whose Vatican doctor said was in such perilous health.
He was exhausted by it, and referred to his herculean
effort in his interview with Sky’s Andrew Bolt. After two days of the
Cardinal’s evidence, Bolt wrote a column in the News Limited tabloids
criticising Pell for his ‘sad story that wasn’t of much interest’ gaffe. Pell
had, in Bolt’s view, ‘uttered words that...
In 1974, in Ballarat East, a little boy was packed off to
start school. His name was Lyndon Mark Monument. Lyndon was following his older
brother and big sister to St Alipius primary school just down the road. The
Monument children were attending a school and a church with an illustrious
Catholic goldfields history. St Alipius sprang from a community of 1850s mining
parents who camped on the land and wanted to see their children taught in the
Catholic tradition. It was the thirteenth non-government school opened in the
Victorian colony.
Some time after the Pell business at the pool, Lyndon
Monument says his brother Craig got wind of what the priest had been up to. It
was Damian Dignan who let Craig know. Monument says his brother cautioned him
it was best not to speak up about it. ‘With the George Pell thing, we just kept
that quiet and kept it all amongst us. Because you feel like a dickhead,’
Monument says. ‘No-one wanted to be called a gay-bo. And, you know what I mean,
when your friends, when you are young, you just don’t want that shit getting
out.’...
Months before I even knew Damian Dignan and Lyndon
Monument existed, I met a guy called Les Tyack. Tyack is a family man who lives
on a sprawling property at Torquay on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula. Tyack has
three adult kids, is a retired owner of a manufacturing business and is an
open-faced, easygoing man who has had, by his own estimation, a fortunate life.
A week or so before I met Tyack, a story had been broken
in the Herald Sun about a Victoria Police investigation into Pell
himself. The story named some of the locations of alleged abuse—
One of the things that has always bugged me a little by
the response to the 7.30 story on Pell was that Tyack was the clincher. The
part of the story that made people convinced that the Pell allegations were
true. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, ‘That guy at the
surf club was so credible’, ‘He’s got no reason to lie’, ‘That
surf club man is what made me believe your story’, then I would have
been able to buy myself a pretty fancy frock.
On 27 July 2016, our story went to air. It was the first
time in at least twenty years that the program had dedicated its entire slot to
one story. The moments before we pressed send on the final cut are etched onto
my brain like a lithograph. I felt like one of those people who dives with
sharks in a nature documentary. You just step out, one flipper in front of the
other, and plunge into the dark depths of icy water. The adrenaline courses
through your veins like fizzy lemonade and you hope for the best.
On the day this book was published, the Victorian Office
of Public Prosecutions sent the Pell brief back to Victoria Police and advised
that Taskforce SANO was free to charge Cardinal George Pell if it wished. Six
weeks later, on 29 June 2017, Pell was charged with multiple historic child sex
offences.
Damian Dignan saw the announcement on the news in
Ballarat but his health deteriorated and he died six months later. He was
fourteen days shy of his forty-eighth birthday.
On 11 December 2018 Pell was found guilty of five child
sex offence charges: one charge of sexual penetration...
PUBLISHER: Melbourne University Press. Cardcover 233mm
x 155mm. 388 pages. Index. ISBN: 9780522874600. Weight: 850g