Comment: George Pell has fallen, but his legacy will live on
a far worse one before the royal commission in 2016 . He came across as wooden, unsympathetic and unwilling to accept responsibility for church failings, instead blaming – as so many witnesses did – the dead or demented who could not reply. Members of the Royal Commission were clearly incredulous at some of his answers. Worse still, giving evidence by video from Rome ensured he attracted wider international attention – it couldn’t be buried in a distant corner of the globe.
Pope Francis does, too, but he sees clericalism – the idea that priests are specially entrusted with guarding the church’s tradition and teaching and deserve deference – as the church’s biggest weakness, while to his predecessors it was the natural order. Francis calls it “a toxic sickness” and dislikes the inflexible dogmatism that was one of Pell’s chief virtues to Francis's predecessors.
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