In which the pond says farewell to the frock lover in a final Sunday meditation on his many sins and failings ...

 

With great reluctance, the pond decided to indulge in one last bout of Pellism, though only because the reptiles kept insisting on it, and prattling Polonius always had his place in the pond's Sunday meditative pew reserved ... but the pond only agreed if it could do a cut and paste, and shovel in some alternatives ...

Those with a longer memory than the pond will recall yesterday's quotation by the grundle in full grundling flight ...

...Roman Catholicism in Australia has become identified with its Mary mafia faction, the most power-obsessed, arrogant, self-satisfied and cynical side of the church, which ran from Pell to the editorial section of The Australian to the Sydney Institute (“cultural Catholics”) and back again.

Even before Pell became publicly associated with abuse cover-ups and the heavying of victims and complainants, he gave the impression that the church was about anything other than love, an appearance reinforced by the op-ed Spenglerism of Paul Kelly, the neurotic self-pity of Abbott, and the manic ravings of Greg Sheridan, whose incurious, unresponsive religiosity is simply a desperate desire for a simple framework to give meaning in the flux of the world — a self-hypnosis act, complete with angels, Marian visions and the rest. Who the hell would want that? The evangelists and Pentecostals have rock music, and tell you something in the universe loves you. Whose churches are crowded aircraft hangars, and whose are being converted into Thai restaurants?  

But it was with the exposure of widespread sexual abuse, the churchwide cover-up, and the lack of any sign of deep reflection by the church, that many Australians, including young ones, in a new postmodern, post-secular environment, really wrote them off as anything other than a mafia with hymns and a land portfolio. 

That reference to the Sydney Institute does take in Polonius, and it gives some context to the dribble that follows, what with the lizard Oz being home to all the ratbags noted above...

It's just the usual ... blame the meejia to distract from the man ... and yet the man himself was his own worst enemy and the worst enemy for his own causes, as noted in the Graudian in George Pell’s political legacy: why the Catholic warrior ultimately lost on marriage equality, climate and abortion.

Meanwhile, over at Crikey, the grundle carried on with his grundling polemic, and the pond simply offers some of it as an alternative to Polonius's whining and carry-on ...

... it was with the exposure of widespread sexual abuse, the churchwide cover-up, and the lack of any sign of deep reflection by the church, that many Australians, including young ones, in a new postmodern, post-secular environment, really wrote them off as anything other than a mafia with hymns and a land portfolio. 

Here the church was caught in a shift of the historical plates that threatened to crush it altogether. When the sexual abuse scandals began to emerge in the 1970s, it was not only because the era had become one of questioning power. It was because it was one in which sexual being had become central to the idea of a fully lived life.

Previously, within Christianity, you wanted sex, maybe, and maybe you got it. If you didn’t — if a marriage was sexless or mismatched, or inceldom for man or woman occurred — it was a disappointment, maybe even a major one. But it didn’t annihilate you as a person. But in the 1960s, after a century that turned back to the sensual and particular, Bloomsbury, Freud, Reich, Anais Nin, Helen Gurley Brown and more, sex became the sacrament the church had previously offered, the way to ecstatic being, fusion of body, soul and love — and on its own terms, not as a component of procreation and the cosmic architecture that employed. 

So, in a manner that would simply not have been recognised by many before the late 1950s, sexual abuse of children, in ruining sex for the adults they grew into, came to be understood as a form of soul murder. Abusive priests used the cover of the sun through stained glass and transcendent music to make a hell in heaven’s despite. And they made it in the soul, and the marrow, of each man or woman who suffered it as boy and girl, and could never subsequently defeat it.

Pell’s Australian Catholic Church has never been able to fully acknowledge the full character of what it has done, because to do so would be to admit that the post-’60s secular-pagan version of life, with the centrality of sex, has won, and is now seen as a truer picture of what the world is. Nothing the church offers by way of an alternative encounter with being and the universe seems to be any sort of sufficient consolation.

Had the church understood, really understood, at the institutional level, the real horror of what it had done, it would have had some sort of global near-collapse, which would have been a step on the way to its own salvation. Instead, the incomprehension of its wrong opened it to pursue the ends of power, by all means necessary — the massive, coordinated and organised cover-ups and movements, which allowed paedophile priests to remain active for decades at a time. 

With this, the Roman Catholic Church tipped into radical evil. The methods of movement and cover-up were simply a repurposing of methods already developed for the rescue of Nazis, through the “ratlines” operated at the end of World War II, to smuggle them to South America and the Arab world. With the fusion of these two purposes in a continuous practice, we can go beyond mere sociological and political categories to say that post-WWII the Roman Catholic Church — or large and powerful sections of it — was essentially satanic. They were agents of the adversary to all life and love, a portal for the bringing of despair into the world.

It is arguable that the only possible moral act of those in the Roman Catholic Church in these years would have been to seek to destroy the church in its own name, in order for it to re-emerge in a wholly changed form. Christianity, arguably, emerged as an answer to the spreading death cult of Rome. A similarly rupturing act may have been necessary. 

Pell and people of his ilk were not the types to do that. But in their desperate attempt to save the church as a worldly institution, they may have hurried it on to very rapid decline in a place like Australia.

Let’s stipulate that Roman Catholicism is not going to wink out of existence in Honduras, Galway or Palermo. But here? There’s a limit to how far active attendance can fall before a reversal occurs and the hallowed spaces of cathedral and church see their majesty become self-parody, words echoing in empty stone. That’s not something I wish for it, but it’s a future it’s Blundstone Borgia made more, not less, likely. 

An eccentric interpretation, in the now patented grundle manner? 

Undoubtedly ... he's possibly bidding to become the new Bob Ellis, but great fun to juxtapose with Polonius's endless whining about the meejia ... as the reptiles seize the opportunity to stuff that Polonial stocking with clickbait videos ...

The frock lover was a very big supporter of the y'artz? 

Is that the best the reptiles have to offer for the scurrilous behaviour of the rat fink anonymous back-stabbing cowardly ratbag, too gutless to put his name to a poison pen piece about his boss?

But the pond has already noted that, and correspondents can google or ask Jeeves as they like. 

How about some fresh material? As well as grundling away, Crikey offered some memories of the frock lover's finest moments ...

And so on and on, and what a vile, contemptible man he was, just the sort that would attract the devotion of a Polonius, always attacking the meejia on his behalf ...

But Pell was his own worst enemy and the enemy of his causes. and always tone deaf, and without a hint of grace or love or compassion or humanity... 

What Jesus would have made of him is anybody's guess, but he would likely have sensed the spirit of the Jewish leaders who hated him...

Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy.

What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death.

Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others smote him with the palms of their hands,

Saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee? (KJV)

That's very high priest frock lover, with the renting and the incitement and the smiting and the smoting, and the frock lover was always up for a smoting ...

H was always causing offence, and offence and gates were frequently taken, and no amount of obfuscation or blather about trial by meejia can hide that ...

Of course that Crikey listicle of some of the frock lover's greatest moments left out the frock lover's greatest crime, one he's no longer around to witness the consequences thereof, though it's covered in the Graudian here ...

And so on and on, and speaking of fond memories, the pond can't begin to count the number of times it ran in an infallible Pope dedicated to the frock lover ... (not to mention all the times the pond showed the frock lover in some spectacular frocks) ...

And now, as they say, in for a penny, in for a pound, and so it's on with the Angelic one ...

Admittedly up against the insidiously tedious Polonius, she's lightweight fare, but it's the final Sunday meditation the pond will ever devote to Pellism, so what the heck ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, no wonder the pond defanged that reptile click bait video claiming that the frock lover was very compassionate ... no wonder they put inverted commas around the words ...

Back to the grundle for a few more words on the matter of compassion, grace, bruisers and headkickers...

The late cardinal George Pell is either nowhere at all, or somewhere on Parnassus, puffing his way up Purgatory. The hope expressed by many progressives that he hath descended unto hell is in basic error. It seems highly unlikely that Pell would have rejected God prior to the operation whose complications he perished from, or have committed a mortal sin not shriven during or after the operation. For whatever he has done in his life, he must pay the price midway between hell and heaven, before he enters the latter by the grace of God. Or absolutely nothing happens to him at all ever again.

Whatever the case, his presence will not be leaving this earth any time soon. In death, as in life, Pell is too important to both sides of the great progressive v “the right” social war, to be let go of just yet.

The tributes paid to him by the latter have been ridiculous, just utterly absurd, constructing this ruthless Vatican fixer and lifelong politician as some sort of humble priest, floating along in a state of grace, exuding the calm and serenity offered by his faith. 

Ha. If there was ever anyone less graceful as a public figure than George Pell, let them come forward. Pell was an old-fashioned Catholic bruiser, come out of the RC heartland of central Victoria in the 1950s, which is like coming here from the 19th century. He was certain of the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, and thus the unique truth of Christianity — and his church’s version of it in particular.

Having got a meat-and-potatoes faith from his family, he showed no inclination to reflect on it publicly, even as such belief became increasingly intellectually absurd. But nor did he want to be publicly identified as a Jesus man, prating about our Lord. He put his abilities into politics and organisation at a state, national and then global (I guess, cosmic) level, to the church’s advantage and to Pell’s personal gain, in power and prestige. Any honest supporter of his would acknowledge that, rather than suggest that this jowly Vatican hard man was some sort of elfin sprite of blah blah blah. 

Pell didn’t do much public whining about the year and more he spent in jail on a conviction quashed 7-0, still less the ridiculous and unGodly comparisons with Jesus’ ordeal that Tony Abbott is making, not because he was humbled and circumspect concerning his other sins regarding sexual abuse in the church, but because he didn’t want anything, anything, to dim the lustre of that power. He was on his way back to the Vatican the moment they were processing him out the prison gate. 

Politically and organisationally, he has unquestionably strengthened the church, here and globally. He was the numbers man in the election of Pope Benedict, bouncing ’round Rome for weeks stitching factions together, seeing the council as no more than an extension of the NSW right. Thereafter he was given enormous power to try to break the church’s deep state within its tangled and chaotic financial institutions. Since Vatican finances had been the cause of possible murder in the 1970s, just preceding the surprise death of John Paul I a month after his election, it was not without risk, and it is not impossible that such a role was not unconnected with the sudden return of child sex abuse allegations from out of the past. 

But whatever his organisational successes, Pell’s muscular conservatism, his apparent conviction that the church really had nothing to apologise for, or deeply scrutinise itself over, was clearly a disaster for the spread and success of Roman Catholicism in Australia. The faith could have become identified with a figure like Father Bob McGuire, as relentless fighters for the oppressed, the beating heart of a heartless world. In doing so, it could have won people over, without having to surrender on abortion or the rainbow agenda. 

Instead, Roman Catholicism in Australia has become identified with its Mary mafia faction, the most power-obsessed, arrogant, self-satisfied and cynical side of the church, which ran from Pell to the editorial section of The Australian to the Sydney Institute (“cultural Catholics”) and back again...

Ah, but that's where the pond started, and speaking of the Mary mafia faction, the gathering of reptiles at the lizard Oz, it's back to the Angelic one ...

Ah yes, when in doubt, blame the meejia and never no mind the deeds and thoughts of the man ... with the aerial ping pong man turning out to be a climate scientist of the first water ...

...Neil Ormerod, a retired professor of theology formerly at the Australia Catholic University, says Pell ignored the encyclical.

“It made no difference to him,” he says. “But Laudato Si will be remembered long after George Pell becomes a footnote in history.”

Ormerod remembers discussing climate change with Pell in about 2009 and being shocked by his scepticism.

“He was my employer at the time,” Ormerod says. “Part of it was that George was a political animal and he grew up in a world of anti-communists and with the collapse of communism, they needed a new opponent to focus their concerns.

“Really he saw the emerging green movement as a new form of communism. He referred to them as watermelons – green on the outside but red on the inside. He saw it as neopagan.”

Pell and Abbott shared similar ideas about the validity of climate science and the broader environmental movement – both believing environmentalism was a form of dangerous religious dogma.

“If nothing else, Pell provided Abbott with spiritual succour for maintaining this very hardline climate change denialism position,” Ormerod says.

Even when papal teaching was moving in the opposite direction, Ormerod says, Pell’s scepticism provided cover for the likes of Abbott, who were able to point to Pell’s scepticism as being consistent with their religious beliefs.

Among the church hierarchy, Ormerod says, Pell’s hardline stance held the organisation back and muted any response to the growing threat of climate change.

“Pell’s position on climate was disappointing, but it was just one of many disappointments,’ he says. “On a range of social issues, whether it be sexuality or industrial relations, he took a very conservative line politically and aligned himself with these retrograde political movements. And that held us back.” (link as above)

It goes without saying that the lizard Oz is still a haven for climate science denialism, and bigotry of many hues ... and full of worshipful devotees to that devoted lover of frocks, and so for the very last time, a celebration of the frock lover in full frock flight ...

Vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher.

And over in the States they're in some kind of weird panic about men in frocks.

What a strange world it is, how deeply weird, but none of this will ever permeate the elephant hide of a prattling Polonius or an Angelic one, what with them busy having lunch with the frock lover ...

The pond understood that this sort of tosh would probably see it running like a Tamworth dog out into the backyard in the noonday sun, guitars twanging in Peel street, to munch on grass and thereby induce a copious vomit ... but with the upheave over, the upchuck done and spent, how cathartic, and what a relief never to have to think of the frock lover again, and all that's left is the chance to bestow a final blessing, thanks be unto Kudelka ...

And so to a final word from the infallible Pope ...

Oh and a final thought from Wilcox on one of many infamous remarks ...