In some ways, George Pell, the outspoken and brawling conservative Catholic from Victoria, was better suited to his adopted home in Sydney
Fisher, who replaced Pell as archbishop when he left for Rome, paid tribute to his predecessor on Wednesday as “a man of courage and with a big heart, who trusted in divine providence”. He said Pell’s episcopal motto was “Be Not Afraid”, and lived up to that maxim in “good days and bad”.
“He was dealing with a different town and a different church. This was not [B. A.] Santamaria territory. NSW and its hierarchy had sided against Pell’s kind of Catholic,” Marr wrote in 2013. With his deep intellect and divine righteousness, Pell threw himself into the political debates of the city and the nation. His consecration as archbishop came days after Sydney’s supervised heroin injecting room opened mere blocks away in Kings Cross, supported by the Uniting Church. Pell opposed the clinic, having said weeks earlier in a doctrinal statement: “If you are pumping heroin in, it is never safe.
A committee of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference asked retired judge Alec Southwell to examine the claims. Amid doubts over the complainant’s evidence, Southwell found the complaint had not been substantiated.concluded that Pell “remains the man most likely to become Australia’s next cardinal”. That prediction came true a year later, when Pell was elevated by Pope John Paul II.
Benedict used the occasion to apologise to the victims of sexual abuse by Australian clergy, and met with a small group of survivors at St Mary’s before leaving the country. “He shot from the hip,” says James Franklin, vice-president of the Australian Catholic Historical Society and a retired mathematics professor. In a 2017 paper for theChristian journal, Franklin described Pell as “a man from the south but with sceptical Sydney attitudes”.
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