How did George Cardinal Pell, Prince of the Church, become a persecuted political prisoner, Australia’s Cardinal Mindszenty?

When the internationally esteemed Cardinal is finally laid to rest in Sydney’s great Basilica, it will be in the crypt already honoured with a bust of the persecuted Hungarian Prince-Primate.

Meanwhile, how were certain police, politicians, lawyers, journalists and even judges, so successful in suspending core Australian values and institutions, especially, the presumption of innocence, the burden and standard of proof and thus, the rule of law?

Why were the police allowed to pressure the jury by parading him into court daily through baying mobs, as if he were in a tumbril going to the guillotine?

If they could do this to a Prince of the Church, my fellow Australians, imagine just what the forces of evil could do to you.

We may never know the full story concerning the forces gathered behind what was an extraordinary abuse of justice.

The Victorian police have, unsurprisingly, refused to investigate evidence of another layer of involvement, that from corrupt and hostile elements within the Vatican.

And even after the High Court made its unanimous ruling quashing Pell’s illicit conviction, for far too many the Cardinal has remained a defamation-free zone.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews disgracefully used his refusal of a state funeral, one never sought, by gratuitously claiming that this would be ‘deeply, deeply distressing for every victim survivor of Catholic Church sexual abuse’. Media echo chambers repeat this slander endlessly.

In the eyes of his enemies, Cardinal Pell’s real crime was to proclaim traditional Christian belief, and to reject the fashionable neo-communist dogmas, excreted like Churchill’s ‘bacillus plague’ from American propaganda units posing as university departments.

But it was the essentially Christian way in which he responded to his persecution that was remarkable. Rather than being bitter and revengeful, his faith was strengthened as was his sense of forgiveness, precisely as taught by Jesus. This even extended to forgiving the cruellest punishment of all, not being allowed to say Mass daily.

His forgiveness was an example of the heroic virtue we see in his three-volume Prison Journal, which with the magisterial studies of Frank Brennan, Gerard Henderson, Tess Livingstone, and Keith Windschuttle, and the many in Quadrant, reveal the real George Pell, not the arrogant and hypocritical prelate invented by a hostile and partisan media.

Now that he has so suddenly been taken from this world, it is especially sad that the Catholic Church and indeed, our wider Judeo-Christian civilisation, have been deprived of the rare quality of leadership he was increasingly offering, most recently in a Spectator piece rightly criticising a dangerous lurch to Marxist inspiration in church governance.

As associate editor of The Spectator Damian Thompson wrote in the Australian, having endured the terrible ordeal of imprisonment on fake charges, Pell was nothing if not courageous. Not knowing he was about to leave this world; he was prepared to face the fury of Pope Francis and others when it was published. As it is, Thompson observes, his sudden death could add ‘extra force’ to his words when a key meeting is held in October.

It was inevitable that he would be seriously talked of as a successor on the intimated abdication of Pope Francis.

Fortunately, the rare quality of his leadership is sure to encourage others.

I count it an honour that I knew him for more than two decades.

My first contact was when John Howard appointed him to the 1998 Constitutional Convention to consider something which, like most Australians, was probably not even on his agenda.

But as with almost two-thirds of those in the PM’s gift – Howard concentrated on the underrepresented, the eminent, young or indigenous – Pell cast his vote for a republic.

When other models had been eliminated, Malcolm Turnbull invited him to propose the motion approving what would become the referendum model.

Turnbull must have been surprised by his opening words: ‘Yesterday, the monarchists voted with discipline, integrity, and honour. Lloyd Waddy (the convenor for Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, ACM) was the very model of a modern major-general. They did not vote tactically. Their virtue brought its own reward. Republican disarray yesterday was our own doing. The republicans know well that to divide is to rule, even when the division is self-inflicted.’

The reference to monarchists not voting ‘tactically’ reflected our refusal to use our numbers to make the ‘least-worst’ McGarvie republic, the model for the referendum, something Turnbull greatly feared.

Cardinal Pell may have later wondered why he bothered to help the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) when he was later made Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop and the ARM leader, Hobart-based Greg Barns, surprisingly denounced him, declaring him not welcome in Sydney.

In subsequent years, Cardinal Pell would praise the monarchy, fitting into the broad alliance of Australians supporting the Crown, so well described by Michael Kirby in his ingenious ACM Charter. A high point was when he graciously agreed to preach at the Queen’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee service at Sydney’s St. James Anglican Church.

‘Saul was anointed King of the Israelite federation by Samuel the priest more than 1000 years before Christ,’ he recalled, pointing out that Roman emperors and Christian kings continued, ‘this monarchical tradition everywhere until revolution and war reduced the number of monarchies’.

But, he said, ‘these thousands of years of monarchical history’, still explain why the position of kings and queens, ‘even more than the concept of bishop, is embedded in the Western psyche’.

He observed that in addition to the respect and affection Australians had for the Queen, the fact that such an ‘ancient and evocative institution’ serves our nation’s practical purposes well helps explain the 1999 referendum result. He warned that any new system, ‘needs to be better’, a warning that our so-called republicans, especially the politicians, still fail to grasp.

Cardinal Pell was a wise and a good man with much more to contribute. His passing is a great loss to the nation, the Catholic Church, and our Judeo-Christian civilisation.