Cardinal Pell Represents the Life of the Church in Our Age

National Catholic Register, 08 June 2021

The cardinal, who turns 80 June 8, is a welcome presence in Rome these days.

Cardinal George Pell turns 80 on June 8. He has, to an extraordinary degree, represented in his person the life of the Church in our age.

Ordained a priest in 1966, he would live the first 20 years of his priesthood in the post-Vatican II turmoil that afflicted the Church in Australia. A priest in Ballarat, he served in the 1970s under Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, later discovered to be greatly negligent in one of Australia’s most notorious cases of clerical sexual abuse.

Pell’s brilliance was evident in those early years. After his ecclesiastical degrees in Rome, he got a doctorate in Church history from Oxford. He returned to his native Ballarat, clearly one of the more capable leaders. The question was whether the increasingly unmoored Church in Australia was looking for his kind of leadership.

A New Kind of Bishop — 1980s 

Father Pell was appointed in 1987 as the auxiliary bishop of Melbourne. At the relatively young age of 45, he was an example of the Pope John Paul II turn in episcopal appointments. Melbourne was led by Archbishop Frank Little, a man not particularly suited to turning Australia’s largest diocese in a more affirmatively orthodox direction. Archbishop Little was not altogether different from the other Australian bishops at the time; the appointment of the young Bishop Pell was an attempt to change that. 

Clear Teaching — 1990s

A sign that Bishop Pell was not just another auxiliary bishop was his appointment as one of the bishop members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). He served from 1990 to 2000 in that role, customarily reserved for much more senior bishops and cardinals. 

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