The Strange Death of Australian Catholicism

“The fort is betrayed even of them that should have defended it.” — St. John Fisher (1469-1535), Catholic bishop judicially murdered by King Henry VIII

To misquote Franz Kafka’s The Trial: Someone must have been telling lies about us ordinary, practicing Australian Catholics. Without having done anything wrong, we were driven from the diocesan Church one fine day in February 2025. I am neither so melodramatic nor so dishonest as to pretend that any bishop chased us away with dogwhips or loomed outside our front doors bearing bell, book, and candle to exorcise us. Rather, the newest, most impudent confirmation that we ordinary laymen are despised and rejected manifested as official silence regarding the recent announcement from the National Redress Commission, set up by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, regarding the alleged sex abuse the commission believed was perpetrated by the late George Cardinal Pell.

This accusation was either true or false. One or the other.

Suppose the accusation against Pell to have been false. In that case, it was incumbent on the whole Australian episcopate to proclaim the accusation’s falsehood from the rooftops, and to condemn afresh the demagogic anti-Catholicism familiar to Australians from such Cold War leftist apparatchiks as H.V. Evatt and “Baghdad Bill” Hartley.

Contrariwise, suppose the accusation to have been true. Then what, pray, explains the bishops’ silence, save an embarrassed concession of the accusation’s correctness (coupled with terror of the Church’s local enemies disclosing wider episcopal kompromat)? If the accusation is correct, whither the findings of those who publicly championed the deceased cardinal, including — should anyone care — me?

Herewith, a miniature autobiographical entr’acte. I slightly knew George Pell, in person and via occasional missives. To his legal fund I intermittently donated. In our few interactions he showed me complete civility. I felt no instinctive suspicion that he might be a sex criminal.

At his peak, George Pell was the mainland’s sole Catholic bishop who evinced substantial political dominance, intellectual significance, and personal bravery. No bishop in the United States, the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, or Latin America occupied the one-man-band role Pell long occupied in Australia. He was the only Catholic prelate in a major city who condescended to notice the culture wars, and who tried (with some perspicacity and hard mental effort) to win those wars.