There's a very interesting personal take on Cardinal George Pell by John Allen, a journalist at the Catholic website Crux.
It's hard to summarise - but Allen obviously liked him, despite being fully aware of his combative character and being on the receiving end of criticism on more than one occasion. Some extracts:
The last time I spoke to Pell was about three weeks ago. He’d called
in part to see how I was doing in my recovery from esophageal surgery
last fall, but, more to the point, to chide me for a recent article I’d
written. I’d called Pope Francis “decisive,” and Pell was livid – the
pope’s problem, he thundered, is that he routinely fails to act, with
his dithering about the German “synodal way” the latest case in point.
Having done everything but call me brain-dead, Pell concluded by
saying, “Well, take care of yourself … we need your voice. Even if you
do sometimes muck it up, at least you’re paying attention.” He then hung
up without waiting for me to reply.
(Following the normal rules of polite telephone interaction seem to be something Pell didn't feel obliged to follow, then.)
More:
I’ve known Pell since his days in Sydney. If memory serves, I think my first interview with him was during the “liturgy wars” in English-speaking Catholicism in the 2000s, when Pell led a new commission created in Rome to supervise the translation of liturgical texts into English.
I remember being stunned at how blunt he was, using peppery adjectives to describe a few of his opponents that would never see the light of day in a family newspaper. From that point on, we struck up a sort of symbiotic friendship – Pell loved getting the latest Roman gossip, and I always enjoyed his assessments of people and politics.
So, I take it that he was blunt and sweary in the discussion of his perceived enemies.
Some years later, Pell’s return to Rome after his legal battles in
Australia more or less coincided with my return to living here
full-time, which gave us the opportunity to see one another more
frequently. Over conversations in his Vatican apartment – which, he
informed my wife Elise and I, he had swept regularly for electronic
surveillance, because the Vatican in his view has become a “police
state” – or over meals at our house and in favorite Rome restaurants,
Pell would share his ever-colorful assessments of personalities and
issues, not to mention his often disparaging take on whatever I’d just
written or said.
As the saying goes, George Pell was sometimes wrong, but never in doubt.
We can add a bit of paranoia to the later Pell character? Mind you, in the Vatican, I suppose it might be deserved.
During one of our recent exchanges, Pell speculated that Pope Francis
was suffering from an undisclosed illness related to his colon surgery
in 2021 and that we’d have a conclave before Christmas. Since the
holidays are over, I’d been meaning to call Pell to rib him about
getting that wrong – sadly, now I’ll never have the chance.
To sum up, the George Pell I knew was brash, hilarious, opinionated
and tough as nails. I never worked for him, but I know plenty of people
who did, and they say he could be equal parts a bull in a China shop and
the most caring father figure you’d ever meet. With Pell, literally,
you got strong doses of both the bitter and the sweet.
Pell thought in “us v. them” terms, and it always irritated him that I
try not to. Yet despite that, he took a genuine interest in my life and
career … he was one of the first to call when I was in the hospital in
October, and I was especially glad to have his prayers.
And finally:
Of course, I realize that Pell was strong medicine, and he wasn’t
everyone’s cup of coffee. With such a polarizing figure, it’s hard to
say anything that’s unassailably objective, but here’s my stab at it.
No matter what else one might conclude, from here on out Roman
Catholicism is going to be just a little less interesting, a little more
gray and dull, because George Pell isn’t around. He will be missed … by
many, many, people, and certainly by me.
I think it fair to say from this description that:
a. he can hardly be said to have a saintly character;
b. he played (very human) power games, hard; and
c. I would not have liked him if I had met him.
More broadly, it is understandable how he is already the "patron saint", so to speak, for conservative Catholics who refuse to think that the Church needs any reform, at all, and yearn for the same power it used to hold over its members until the second half of the 20th century.
