Christ’s Cross helped me avoid bitterness: Cardinal George Pell
The Truth, Justice and Healing Council set up by the Church in Australia at the beginning of the Royal Commission into institutional abuse in 2013 failed seriously to highlight the Church’s decisive record in combatting abuse in this country beginning a quarter of a century ago, Cardinal George Pell said this week.
His criticism came in a wide-ranging pre-recorded interview aired at a Catholic conference in the US on 16 August.
During the interview Cardinal Pell discussed his prayer life in prison and how he had been able to remain spiritually focused despite knowing his own innocence, the support he had received via correspondence from ordinary Catholics around the world, the Vatican’s financial situation and the associated problem of corruption within key institutions.
He also revealed his concerns over aspects of the Synod on the Amazon conducted last October and discussed signs of renewal in the Church – including new Church realities such as Opus Dei and the Neocatechumenal Way – and the importance of the Catholic Church in the US to the future of Catholicism around the world.
“The crooks” have largely been run out of Vatican financial institutions or denied access to them but vigilance is required to prevent corruption and inefficiences that have been endemic in the past, he said.
Truth, Justice and Healing Council’s ‘significant error’
Regarding the Truth, Justice and Healing Commission, he said it had “made a significant error in not explaining to people – it might have been unpopular – that in fact the ‘old’ Church, from the middle nineties, had acted resolutely and effectively, to impede this plague, to prevent the offenses continuing,” he said in the 30-minute interview conducted in Sydney for a congerence organised by the NAPA Institute, a California–based think tank focusing on the Catholic Church.
There was no denying the crimes that were committed, that they were infamous and had been poorly handled by Church authorities, he said, “but in Australia we broke the back of the offending in the middle 90s,” a fact that had even been acknowledged by counsel assisting the Royal Commission during its proceeding.
Catholics would be astonished to know how little offending had actually occurred in recent decades, he said.
“I heard of a public meeting where a friend of mine who actually knew what was going on asked the authorities in that diocese ‘how many offenses in that diocese have you had in Catholic institutions this century?’ And there were none or almost none. And the Catholic audience there was stupefied,” he told Catholic Weekly columnist Monica Doumit.
Dealing with jail
The major change to his spiritual life had been not being able to celebrate the Eucharist each day, he said. Unable to offer the Mass for the intentions of others as he ordinarily would, he instead prayed the Memorarae, a prayer seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as individual requests came to him.
“In jail you’ve got no excuse that you’re too busy to pray,” he said. “I had a regular prayer routine of the Breviary, meditation and I followed spiritual reading generally every day. And on Sunday I watched Mass For You At Home at the impossible hour of six o’clock in the morning.
“Then I watched the American evangelists Joseph Prince from California and Joel Osteen from Texas. And in my journal I’d make a theological critique of their efforts – but both of them are very fine preachers and they’ve got big followings.”
Support from around the world
He estimated he had received around 4,000 letters in jail but had almost-exclusively limited himself to responding – against legal advice – to fellow prisoners. He had done this because he felt it was his duty as a priest, he said.
People from all over the world and every background in life had written to him during his jail time, including two women in Texas. Their letters had been “very stimulating and beautiful, interesting, letters. They gave me something to ‘chew on’ theologically and spiritually,” he said.
He stayed abreast of world events through reading a Melbourne newspaper three times a week and watching SBS world news broadcast each evening.
“So I was pretty well abreast of things and people would send me cuttings. Friends sent me loads of articles,” he said.
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https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/christs-cross-helped-me-avoid-bitterness-cardinal-george-pell/
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