[N.B. This article was originally published in the February 28, 2023 edition of The Remnant Newspaper]
It was a hot morning. The Cathedral was full and hundreds of mourners stood outside, many with rosaries in hand praying on their knees. The protesters had gathered in Hyde Park just opposite; waving rainbow flags; blowing whistles and chanting through megaphones, “Racist, sexist, homophobe”, “George Pell rot in hell”. At the southern entrance to the Cathedral, the solemn procession began with the sound of the choir and the magnificent organ of St Mary’s. The Archbishop of Sydney, before entering, turned to the mourners outside, acknowledging them with a wave and a blessing. The mourners waved back, applauded, smiled. The protesters immediately began their own procession, heading straight for the mourners, trying to drown out the sacred music, hurling insults at the Catholics. Some mourners on the Catholic side, no longer able to hear the televised coverage outside, held up rosaries as a silent response to the heckling.
Yes, sadly, it is now official. In Australia funerals are no longer left to the grieving. Enemies of the Church no longer allow Catholics to bury their dead in peace. A precedent has been set: even funerals, provided they are Catholic, are now fair game. If your cause is socially acceptable, you may loudly, shamefully and maliciously disrupt a Catholic Requiem Mass and heckle family members and mourners. Not only that, you will receive full legal authorisation, police protection, implicit praise from the media and complicit silence from a brainwashed misinformed populace.
On 2nd February 2023, Australia, a land which occasionally claims to be the land of common decency and of giving everyone a “fair go”, took yet another embarrassing step downwards in its moral decline and its protracted war on logic by allowing and celebrating a display of hatred, disrespect, intolerance and blatant anti-Catholic bigotry at the Sydney funeral of the late Cardinal George Pell.
Pell was one of the most courageous yet hated men Australia has ever produced. He did things no one had the guts to do. He was the first senior clergyman in the world to report cases of sexual abuse to police. The first. As Archbishop of Melbourne he reformed the seminary, insisting that they teach Catholicism, that they stop using Billy Joel as liturgical music, and making risqué presentations about sex. But this, to put it mildly, was not well-received and the entire faculty resigned en masse. He faced down a hostile audience, a smirking smug adjudicator and a visiting celebrity atheist in a televised debate on Catholicism. He dared to express Catholic views on life, marriage family. As a unique comptroller of the Vatican’s world finances he discovered 1.2 billion euros of unaccounted expenses. As his brother David Pell said in his eulogy, this discovery “sealed his fate”, setting in motion a diabolical plan to have Pell removed, neutralised, shamed. He voluntarily returned from Rome to face his accusers, knowing that his conviction on manufactured charges was preordained. True to his motto (“Be not afraid!”) he feared nothing, except disloyalty to his Lord and Saviour.
Pell was the feared enemy of the powerful and corrupt: of the sexual abusers, the venal politicians, the media magnates and judiciary whose tentacles of influence are far-reaching. No wonder the easily-manipulated, lazy, misinformed “progressive” mob – staunch defenders of a legal system when it condemns Pell, sceptics of the same system when it exonerates him – hate his memory and legacy, and distort the historical record. No wonder they felt the need to scream at those mourning this giant of a man, creating an embarrassing spectacle of public calumny – a vociferous, ignorant, megaphone-wielding disruption to a Catholic funeral, where women and men and whole families had gathered to grieve and pray. The mob’s blind hatred was there for all to see, and despite all their puerile attempts at intimidation and despite the full support given to them by the most influential sections of the media and the majority of political leaders, Pell’s courageous example continues to inspire loyal Catholics to fear nothing – neither abuse, nor death, nor persecution and imprisonment for one’s faith – nothing, in short, that our decaying culture continues to hurl at them.
The coverage of the Requiem Mass by a feckless media, from both left-wing and some conservative outlets, transformed what ought to have been the story of Pell’s life, legacy and funeral into coverage of the protest – the “tense standoff”, the “angry scenes” – while for the most part affording a sympathetic, even encouraging voice to the protesters and their actions at a funeral service, their hatred of the Catholic Church, of the deceased and of those who came to pray and mourn. Reporters marched shoulder to shoulder with the protesters. Even the few interviews conducted with mourners on one conservative news outlet did not make it to the final cut. The Australian media apparatus failed to point out what used to be considered obvious: that disrupting a funeral has never before been tolerated as acceptable by anyone’s standards, and that we should in fact all feel shame that such a disgrace could occur. Moreover, they claimed the protest was all about abuse victims, when to all those present, the chanting, the flags and the placards were targeting Pell’s defence of Catholic teaching on marriage and family. In life as in death, Pell was the victim of falsehood, slander, and self-righteous hypocritical exhibitionism.
It may be some time before Australia humbly and contritely acknowledges the truth. George Pell was one of the greatest, most honest and loyal Catholics Australia has ever produced. He was great for his many achievements as Bishop and Cardinal, his uncompromised fidelity to affirming perennial Catholic teachings however difficult and unpopular they are to secular ears and church bureaucrats, and for the dignity with which he responded to his many persecutors. As one former Prime Minister noted, this wrongly convicted scapegoat for the crimes of others, bore each travesty of justice as a true Christian should: the police investigation, mysteriously launched without a complaint being lodged; the arrest without any corroborating evidence, the media smear campaigns without research into the obvious facts, the trial without a plausible case being made, the conviction, the long prison sentence, the solitary confinement, the jeers from the mob when he was finally exonerated and released after 404 nights in jail, the permanently damaged reputation, the lack of any apology from the witch-hunters and press hounds, even the scorn and sarcasm from many spineless clergymen in their homilies … and now, to round it all off, the disgraceful vitriol and spittle from the mob.
“Be not afraid!”, was Pell’s motto. May we all thank God that in these sad times such courage still exists and pray that, one day, more Australians will overcome their fear of being unpopular, or cancelled by the mob, and will know, respect and ultimately love the Truth.
