Australia’s Cardinal
George Pell,
who died Tuesday at 81, was the most influential Catholic churchman in the English-speaking world. Pell devoted his considerable talents and prodigious energies to proclaiming the Gospel, refusing to be cowed by a culture turning against its Christian heritage. Persecuted in his native Australia, he suffered a wrongful sexual-abuse conviction but emerged with his reputation intact and his credibility enhanced.
Pell was born in 1941 in Ballarat, about 60 miles west of Melbourne. An outsize presence from his early days, he was a towering physical force who excelled at Australian rules football and in the classroom. He started his seminary studies at home before completing them in Rome and earning a doctorate at Oxford. As he returned to Australia, he was marked by the Vatican for leadership, the only man ever to serve as archbishop of both Melbourne (1996-2001) and Sydney (2001-14).
Pope
John Paul II
created him a cardinal in 2003. Under Pope Benedict XVI, Pell led efforts to produce a new English translation of the Mass, rendering a text both more beautiful and more faithful to the original Latin. In 2014
Pope Francis
appointed him to lead his financial-reform efforts, effectively making Pell the third-highest ranking cardinal in Rome. Few men received appointments from all three popes.
Pell kept in his office in Sydney a picture of Cardinal
John O’Connor,
archbishop of New York (1984-2000), as his model for how to proclaim Christ robustly in a sometimes hostile public square. He invited O’Connor to Melbourne to dedicate a new altar in his cathedral, also called St. Patrick’s: a declaration that Pell intended to follow O’Connor’s uncompromising combination of Catholic orthodoxy, moral truth, pro-life witness and solidarity with the poor. He took “Be not afraid,” Pope John Paul II’s signature biblical phrase, as his own motto.
Pell’s forthrightness caused discomfort for the flaccid Catholic establishment in Australia. When O’Connor died in 2000, Pell assumed his indomitable mantle for the English-speaking Catholic world. He was a leading advocate of Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger’s
election as pope in 2005, and had emerged as one of Benedict’s staunchest lieutenants by 2008, when the…
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