Remembering George Cardinal Pell: Recollections of a Great Man of the Church

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.

Tracey Rowland, ODM (Poland) holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). From 2014-2019 she was a member of the International Theological Commission, in 2020 she won the Ratzinger Prize for Theology, and in 2023 she was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences. In 2024 she was awarded an honorary doctorate Litteris Humanioribus by Christendom College in Virginia. She is a Patron of the Australian Catholic Students’ Association.