The Religion of the Humble? Cardinal Pell and the Peril of Institutional Atheism

In his chapter on “The Church and Our Lady,” de Lubac points to Mary as “the perfect worshipper,” as the “consummation of the religion of the humble” and, as such, she is “the ideal figure of the Church” and “the mirror in which the whole Church is reflected.” What makes her such is that, in her humility, she directs all people toward the glory of God: “Soli Deo gloria – everything in Mary proclaims that.” For de Lubac, the opposite of this Marian disposition – a disposition which, he insists, belongs to the Church’s “very principle” – is the tendency of the Church to conduct its affairs in a manner that effectively renders it opaque, that arrogates glory to itself by becoming the focus and end of its own activities.

This, according to de Lubac, is a form of “spiritual worldliness” which feigns the appearance of a kind of “other-worldly” orientation but behaves as though God did not exist. De Lubac is here deeply indebted to the English Benedictine Anscar Vonier, Abbot of Buckfast Abbey, who writes in his book, The Spirit and the Bride:

“To become worldly is a peril that is never absent; when we say that worldliness is [the Church’s] snare we mean by worldliness a more subtle thing than is usually meant by this expression. We generally understand by worldliness the love of wealth and luxury amongst the Church’s dignitaries; this is, of course, an evil, but it is not the principal evil. Worldliness of the mind, if it were ever to overtake her, would be much more disastrous for the Church than worldliness of apparel. By worldliness of mind we understand the practical relinquishing of other-worldliness, so that moral and even spiritual standards should be based, not on what is the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man …”

Throughout the two and a half days of testimony given by Cardinal George Pell before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, and the two weeks of testimony from senior Catholic clergy and Archdiocesan personnel that preceded it, these warnings have haunted me at every turn. For how else could the conduct of the Archdiocese of Sydney in its dealings with John Ellis, a formerly devout Catholic lawyer who had been sexually abused as a child by Father Aidan Duggan between 1974 and 1979, be described other than as a most egregious form of spiritual worldliness – or, if I might put it in my own vernacular, a form of institutional atheism?

Like many hundreds of other survivors, John Ellis came forward in 2002 in the wake of a rolling series of reports of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal mismanagement and prevarication that emerged from Boston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Louisville and elsewhere. In June of that year, Ellis presented himself to the Church’s Towards Healing process, seeking help with the “emotional and spiritual dilemmas” he was facing. The personally devastating and morally reprehensible series of events that followed had, mercifully, less to do with flaws inherent to Towards Healing itself – apart from the highly questionable roles played by lawyers and insurers in what is meant to be a pastoral process – than it did with failures in implementation (especially on the part of John Davoren, then director of the Professional Standards Office, Monsignor Brian Rayner, then Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Sydney, and finally Cardinal Pell), unacceptably long delays, episcopal inconsistency and, whether intentionally or not, a cold disregard for the stated needs of John Ellis himself.

These pastoral failures would see Ellis’s claims of abuse successively dismissed by Davoren in December 2002 (Ellis would be informed in a letter signed by Cardinal Pell, which he received on Christmas Eve, no less); upheld after a proper assessment had been conducted in November 2003; minimised in the course of a sclerotic facilitation that took place between May and July 2004 (Ellis recounted that the reason given by the facilitator, Raymond Brazil, for the meagre amount of the ex gratia payments proposed by the Archdiocesan authorities was “they only look at the seriousness of the conduct and not on how you are affected … they don’t consider your abuse to be that serious”); and finally disputed by the Archdiocese when the matter proceeded to litigation in August 2004.

That John Ellis’s complaint did proceed to the Supreme Court of New South Wales was precipitated, in large part, by the insertion of patently inappropriate quasi-legal elements into the pastoral process itself, in the form of a deed of release which would indemnifying the Archbishop and Trustees of the Archdiocese against further claims. This effectively funnelled Ellis, more out of desperation than malice, into civil litigation; although, even then, Ellis repeatedly made overtures to the Archdiocese expressing his desire to settle the matter through mediation. By this stage, however, a certain prejudice had hardened in the minds of Monsignor Rayner and Cardinal Pell, among others, that John Ellis (in Pell’s own words) was “a brilliant lawyer” who would not have opted for “this path [of litigation]” unless he was after “serious money.”

It is at this point that what can charitably be described as the Church’s abject failure compassionately and consistently to implement an otherwise sound process descended into an outright denial of the Church’s very principle. In order to “preserve the patrimony of the Church” and “protect the role of the Trustees in particular,” Cardinal Pell endorsed an aggressive legal strategy that would dispute John Ellis’s claims of abuse, defend against any extension of the statute of limitations or suggestion of vicarious liability on the part of the Archdiocesan Trustees, resist “excessive damages” and deny Ellis himself access to a spiritual advisor. Throughout the course of the litigation and subsequent appeal, Cardinal Pell insists that the “defence was not conducted improperly in a legal sense” but that its express intention was to “discourage Mr Ellis and others like him” from pursuing litigation – to make, in other words, an example of John Ellis.

It has become all too common for the Church’s modern detractors to assign to Cardinal Pell nefarious motivations, or even to accuse him of a “sociopathic lack of empathy” – and, unfortunately, there was little in Pell’s testimony to persuade them otherwise. But, it seems to me, the picture that has emerged over the course of the public hearings into the Catholic Church’s dealings with John Ellis is far more disturbing: it is that of a Church that wilfully relinquished what Dom Vonier called its “other-worldliness” – its life lived penitently under divine judgment and in humble submission to divine will – in order to safeguard its worldly prosperity. John Ellis had the right to expect that the Church would comport itself compassionately, penitently and according to the canons of divine justice – a justice brimming with self-sacrifice, a preparedness “to ‘lose oneself’ for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage,” as Pope John Paul II put it in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. What John Ellis confronted was a Church intent on pursuing its legal defence as though there was no divine judge.

That Cardinal Pell did so on the advice of Church lawyers is, finally, no defence at all. George Weigel (himself a long-standing friend of George Pell) has been particularly scathing of the complicity between episcopal cowardice and legal arse covering that has characterised too much of the Catholic Church’s response to sexual abuse in the United States:

“A bishop whose lawyers advise him not to meet with a victim of sexual abuse or with the victim’s family because of possible legal implications needs different lawyers – lawyers who understand what a bishop is, and who have the legal wit and skill to make sure that when the bishop exercises genuine pastoral care and responsibility, he does not end up compromising his legal position or his diocese’s. When the bishop does not understand that this is what he needs, it is the bishop who is primarily at fault.”

This is why, Weigel insists, the Church’s failure to respond compassionately, penitently, justly to victims of clerical sexual abuse is, at bottom, a theological failure: “A bishop who truly believes that he is what the Catholic Church teaches he is – a successor of the apostles who makes present in the Church today the living headship of Christ the Good Shepherd – does not behave like a corporate executive managing a crisis in which he has little personal involvement beyond the protection of his own position.”

Significantly, such criticism of the Church’s dealings with John Ellis according to the Church’s own self-understanding was reflected repeatedly in the lines of questioning pursued by Justice Peter McClellan and Senior Council Gail Furness. At one point, when Cardinal Pell stated that John Ellis had been denied a spiritual advisor once litigation commenced because “pastoral engagement with a complainant” was “not good legal practice,” Gail Furness asked, “Why didn’t the churchman come to the fore?” Justice McClellan questioned Cardinal Pell about his “higher obligation” in giving instructions to the Church’s lawyers. Justice McClellan further challenged the Church’s lawyers, Paul McCann and John Dalzell, as to the ethics of their strategy of casting doubt on John Ellis’s claims of abuse when they knew these claims to be true, and questioned Michael Salmon, director of the Professional Standards Office, as to why the Church disputed Ellis’s claims in the first place: “You knew the Church wasn’t being faithful to its own belief.”

It was this measured, albeit relentless, interrogation of the Church’s actions according to its own canons – and without any hint of a militantly secularist agenda or of the anti-Catholic hysteria so often evinced in the media – that made Cardinal Pell’s not infrequent flashes of battle hardened defensiveness all the more inappropriate. Perhaps this is, as Monsignor John Usher intimated, yet another indication of the vast pastoral and moral distance that separates George Pell a decade ago from George Pell today. Be that as it may, we should at least be thankful for the fidelity of fellow bishops, for the moral clarity of advisors, for the virtuous example of survivors, and for whatever personal conversion took place that enabled Cardinal Pell to make this apology to John Ellis yesterday:

“I would want to say to Mr Ellis that we failed in many ways, some ways inadvertently, in our moral and pastoral responsibilities to him. I want to acknowledge his suffering and the impact of this terrible affair on his life … At this end of this gruelling appearance for both of us at this Royal Commission, I want publicity to say sorry to him for the hurt caused him by the mistakes made, admitted by me, and some of our archdiocesan personnel during the course of the Towards Healing process and litigation.”

Early next week, Cardinal Pell will commence his new Vatican post as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy. It is a role to which he is uniquely suited and for which he is clearly gifted. There is no doubt that his contribution to the life of the Catholic Church of Australia has been immense and ought not be reduced to his pastoral and moral failures with respect to John Ellis and other survivors of sexual abuse. And yet these failures are substantial, and he has contributed to the near total collapse of the Church’s moral authority along with the ability of Christian teaching to fan the flickering moral imagination of the West. To paraphrase St. Paul’s bitter lament, it is on account of such failures that “the name of God is blasphemed” across the Western world. I thus find myself in profound agreement with the sentiments of Patrick Parkinson, that, “in Australia at least, it may be that the crisis of confidence and trust will not pass until the present generation of leaders, who are tainted by their handling of matters earlier in their careers, have passed the baton on to a younger generation.”

The younger generation of Catholic bishops – I’m thinking here particularly of the likes of Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Bishop Anthony Fisher and Bishop Peter Comensoli – will doubtless inherit a Church greatly reduced in its size, its prosperity, its social and political influence, and its moral standing. The worst of all responses would be to succumb to the same institutional atheism, the same “spiritual worldliness” that has seen it defend its prosperity and reputation at the expense of the constitutive practices of penitence, humility and charity – again, to paraphrase the Gospels, what profits a Church to defend its patrimony if it loses its soul? But it is precisely out of such a diminished, properly humiliated position that real hope for the Church might be found. As Joseph Ratzinger would write, with a kind of eerie prescience, in 1969:

“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge – a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity … It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed … But when this trial of sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.”

But, as Ratzinger would never tire of insisting, the Church has only ever been “reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.” That is why Ratzinger stated on another occasion, “The saints were all people of imagination, not functionaries of apparatuses … And the Church, I shall never tire of repeating it, needs saints more than functionaries.” God only knows the damage that has been caused and compounded by predatory priests, cowardly bishops, arse covering bureaucrats and fiendishly effective lawyers. It’s doubtful how far the healing can go without more saints.

Scott Stephens is the Religion and Ethics Editor for ABC Online.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/03/28/3973715.htm