Cardinal George Pell was a significant figure in Australian public life and in the life of the Catholic Church from the time of his appointment to the episcopacy in the 1980s until his death in 2023. His imprisonment for some 404 days for a crime he did not commit was one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Australian legal history. His scape-goat treatment has been compared to that of Alfred Dreyfus in the period of the Third French Republic.
As a defender of Catholic orthodoxy Pell drew opposition from liberal Catholic quarters and from anti-Christian intellectual elites, and as the Vatican’s Prefect for the Economy, he found himself in the position of having to expose and then clean up the financial corruption within the Roman Curia. Thus he was fighting wars on more than one front in more than one country. He had many enemies but he also had many friends and was revered by young Catholics on the orthodox end of the theological spectrum.
While much has been written to vilify him in the popular press by those who opposed his ideas and while some scholars have sought to examine the R v Pell case from an emotionally detached position, this book is something different. It is a collection of memoirs by those who knew him well. It is not intended as an exercise in hagiography or apologetics, but rather it reveals dimensions of the Cardinal’s personality that never made the pages of the popular press.
This book is a record of memories those who knew Cardinal Pell as a gift to future generations of Catholics who may find this era of history of interest. In particular, it is record for younger Catholics who come from families where their parents and grandparents supported the Cardinal. Since the Cardinal was well known, not only in Australia, but across the entire Anglosphere, this collection of memoirs should be of broad, international interest. In the manner of a kaleidoscope, it offers a multidimensional picture of a man who, love him or loathe him, was a passionate defender of the Catholic faith.
Gerhard Cardinal Müller is the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. Formerly the Bishop of Regensburg, Germany, and a professor of theology, he is President of both the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the International Theological Commission. He is also the author of many books, including The Hope of the Family and Priesthood and Diaconate.
George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the New York Times bestselling author of more than two dozen books, including the two volumes of his internationally acclaimed biography of Saint John Paul II, Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning. Other works by Weigel include The Fragility of Order, The Next Pope, Evangelical Catholicism, and Not Forgotten.
Bishop Peter J. Elliott, former auxiliary bishop of Melbourne, has been a consulter to the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship, a member of the Australian Bishop's Liturgical Commission and the Vatican Commission that prepared the Anglican Use for the Personal Ordinariates. He is the author of Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite, Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year, and Liturgical Question Box, all published by Ignatius Press.
