Scottish Catholic Observer

Supporter of young people, marriage and family

CARDINAL George Pell is perhaps the most renowned cardinal in the world today. The Archbishop of Sydney is a theological pugilist unafraid to take the Good News into the most hostile environments and is rightly lauded across the world for his devotion to the Faith.

He will speak in Scotland tomorrow at the St Andrew’s Conference in Glasgow. The conference, entitled From Vatican II to New Evangelisatioon, is part of Scotland’s Year of Faith events, and attendees are in for a treat when this magnificent prelate takes to the podium.

Early vocation

Born in the small town of Ballarat in South Eastern Australia on June 8, 1941, Cardinal Pell (right) was ordained a priest for that diocese a mere 25 years later.

He rose rapidly becoming an Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne Archdiocese  in 1987 before Pope John Paul II announced Cardinal Pell’s appointment as seventh Metropolitan Archbishop of Melbourne in 1997. Four years later, the Holy Father appointed Cardinal Pell the eighth Metropolitan Archbishop of Sydney. His elevation to the Sacred College of Cardinals was announced by Blessed Pope John Paul II on September 28, 2003.

Great learning

His ‘take no prisoners’ reputation conceals a mind of refinement and great learning. The cardinal has a Doctorate of Philosophy in Church History from the University of Oxford (1971). He is a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators, and was Visiting Scholar at Campion Hall, Oxford University, in 1979 and at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, in 1983. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund’s in 2003.

Catholic education has been a key theme of his vocation, and he has served on the boards of numerous Australian Catholic schools and colleges as well as being a member of their National Catholic Education Commission. He was a member of the Bishops’ Committee for Education.

Cardinal Pell’s commitment to Catholic tertiary education is also reflected in the role he played in establishing campuses of the University of Notre Dame Australia in Sydney, giving the east coast of Australia its first Catholic law school and first Catholic medical school. In 2003, he served as Patron of the capital appeal for Campion College, Australia’s first Catholic liberal arts college.

Evangelisation and ecumenism

Having served as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family for many years, Cardinal Pell was appointed to the Presidential Committee of the council in 2002. In 2005 he was appointed a member of the Supreme Committee of the Pontifical Missions Societies by the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples.

In November 1998, Cardinal Pell attended the Synod for Oceania in Rome. He was appointed by Pope John Paul II to represent the Bishops of Australia and Oceania at the Special Synod for European Bishops in Rome in 1999, and at the Synod of Bishops held in October 2001. Pope Benedict XVI also appointed Cardinal Pell to the Synod of Bishops held in October 2006 to mark the close of the Year of the Eucharist. From 2001 to 2008 he served successive terms on the Council of the Synod of Bishops. In 2008, Pope Benedict appointed Cardinal Pell one of three President-Delegates of the Synod on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church.

In April 2005 Cardinal Pell took part in the Conclave of 115 Cardinal Electors which elected His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI as the successor to Pope John Paul II.

Cardinal Pell was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian Government on April 21, 2003, in recognition of his service to the Australian community through the Catholic Church. He was made a Companion in the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2005 for service to the Catholic Church in Australia and internationally, to raising debate on matters of an ethical and spiritual nature, to education, and to social justice.

Cardinal Pell’s long-standing commitment to ecumenism was recognised in 1998 with the conferral of the Grand Cross of Merit of the Order of St Lazarus, and his promotion to Ecclesiastic Grand Cross of St Lazarus, the order’s highest ecclesiastical rank, in 2003. From 2001 to 2007 he served as the order’s national chaplain.

The cardinal’s work in inter-faith relations has included attendance at the Asia-Pacific Interfaith Dialogue (originally established as the Australian-Indonesian summit on inter-religious dialogue and terrorism) in 2004, 2006 and 2007. On each occasion, he attended the dialogue as part of the official Australian delegation led by the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Youth

As archbishop both in Melbourne and Sydney, he has been involved in leading pilgrimages of young Australians to World Youth Days in Rome, Toronto and Cologne. Following the Toronto World Youth Day, Sydney Archdiocese examined the possibility of hosting the event, placing a formal bid for this honour with the Holy See in 2005. The success of this bid was announced at the conclusion of World Youth Day in Cologne in August 2005. The 23rd World Youth Day was held in Sydney from July 15-20, 2008, forming the largest gathering in Australia’s history. More than 110,000 registered pilgrims from more than 170 nations, including Pope Benedict, travelled to Sydney for the occasion, together with another 123,000 registered pilgrims from Australia. In total, 26 cardinals, 420 bishops, and 4000 priests were also in attendance. Cardinal Pell celebrated the opening Mass at Barangaroo on Sydney Harbour before 150,000 pilgrims on July 15. At the Papal arrival, 500,000 people welcomed Pope Benedict on his first visit to Australia, and the final Mass at Randwick Racecourse, which was celebrated by the Holy Father on July 20, attracted more than 400,000 people.

Cardinal Pell’s interest in and support for young people, marriage and families has been demonstrated not only in his preaching and many public statements on these matters, but also in his involvement in founding the Australian campus of the international John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family; the institution of Australia’s first independent commissioner to handle sexual abuse complaints against clergy; and in the creation of the Mary of the Cross Centre in Melbourne to assist families with a member affected by drug or alcohol abuse.

As Archbishop of Melbourne, he commissioned the production of To Know, Worship and Love, a series of texts for use in religious education in Catholic schools. The series continues to be used in Melbourne Archdiocese, and was officially launched and mandated for use in the schools  of Sydney Archdiocese at the end of 2003.

As archbishop in Melbourne and Sydney, Cardinal Pell established Life Offices to promote deeper respect for human life from conception until natural death. In 2003, he inaugurated a competitive bi-annual grant from Sydney Archdiocese to support medical research into the development and application of treatments using adult stem cells.

Cardinal Pell has also written widely in religious and secular magazines, learned journals and newspapers in Australia and overseas, and regularly speaks on television and radio.

He was editor of Light, the magazine of the Ballarat Diocese from 1979 to 1984, and since 2001 he has been a weekly columnist for Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph. Cardinal Pell is a well-known public speaker, who has lectured in the US, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Croatia, Canada and Korea, and every State of Australia.

This high media profile has been supplemented by his numerous books on Faith. His willingness to go to the mattress for his Faith was demonstrated earlier this year when he took on and roundly defeated famed atheist and enemy of the Church Richard Dawkins in a televised debate.

The range and breadth of his service for the Church is truly extraordinary and his message for the St Andrew’s Day Conference of Scotland is sure to be worth hearing.

Beware enemies of religious freedom at home and abroad

One of the key speakers at the St Andrew’s Conference will be George Weigel, the distinguished US Catholic writer and intellectual. The recipient of ten honorary doctorates, the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice and the Gloria Artist Gold Medal by the republic of Poland, he is perhaps best known for his widely acclaimed biography of the blessed Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope.

He took the time to explain to the SCO what he intends to speak about at the conference and why the New Evangelisation is so vital in this secular age.

“I’ll be talking about the seismic shift that has been underway in the Catholic Church for the past century: the transition from the Church of the Counter-Reformation to the Church of the New Evangelisation,” he said. “And I’ll explain a bit of what that transition requires of every Catholic, no matter what their station in life.”

Mr Weigel went on to explain that every Catholic has a role to play in the New Evangelisation.

“Fidelity to the Gospel in full is the essential antidote to the soul-withering secularism of postmodernity,” he said. “Gospel fidelity builds Christian communities that are culture-forming countercultures, attracting converts and ‘reverts’ by the quality of the Christian lives those communities live. At the same time, European Catholics have to fight back against the aggressions of secularists, making clear that anti-Christian bias is an undemocratic toxin in European public life.”

Though many European Catholics have long looked to America for an example of how to challenge secularism, he warns that there will be little aid from that     quarter as they have their own demons to fight.

“Since re-election of President Obama, we are all facing the challenge of aggressive secularism now,” he said. “The difference I observe is that American Catholics tend to put up more of a fight than Catholics in the UK and Ireland.”

As in Scotland, Catholics in the US face the rising spectre of same-sex ‘marriage,’ a development that he thinks will reduce ‘civil marriage to a farce.’

That said, he believes that although President Obama is a great enemy of

religious freedom there is still much

good news in the American Church.

“The Obama administration is the most secularist and statist in US history,” he said.

“But there is also much good news in the Church in America, and the disasters of a second Obama administration, which are inevitable, are going to create real opportunities to explain just why what went wrong, went wrong.”

To that end, he remains inspired by the legacy of his biographical subject Pope John Paul II.

“He left us the witness of a radically converted Christian disciple, whose discipleship bent history in a more humane direction and made Christianity compelling in a world too often suffering from spiritual boredom,” he said.

Like St Andrew, we all struggle to be worthy to serve the Lord

The St Andrew’s Day Conference is a wonderful prompt to look again at the example of Scotland’s patron saint. His example can inspire us to embrace the New Evangelisation and bring new life to the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ.

St Andrew’s biographical details are simple: he was born between AD 5 and AD 10 in Bethsaida, the principal fishing port of Palestine. His parents were Jona and Joanna; his brother was Simon. Jona, along with his business-partner and friend Zebedee and his sons James and John, was a fisherman.

In Greek, Andrew means ‘manl,’ and like, St Andrew, we should embrace a muscular Christianity that battles against all our enemies. St Andrew, after all, brought the first foreigners to meet Jesus and shamed a large crowd of people into sharing their food with the people beside them.

There we see the need to look in unusual places to preach the Gospel and also live a life of virtue, that inspire greater honesty and fidelity in others.

St Andrew was also responsible for spreading the tenets of the Christian religion though Asia Minor and Greece before he was put to death by the Romans in Patras, Southern Greece, by being pinned to a cross. The diagonal shape of this cross is said to be the basis for the Cross of St Andrew which appears on the Scottish flag to this very day.

By his own request the cross was diagonal. He, like his brother Peter, felt himself unworthy to be crucified on the upright cross of Christ.

What sacrifice, for Jesus. Though St Andrew’s times may seem distant to us in many ways our current culture is every bit as hostile to Christianity as the Pagan Roman Empire. Like St Andrew, we must voyage into hostile lands bearing worth the Word of the Lord.

And like St Andrew we may yet be called to sacrifice everything for our Faith, and like St Andrew we should do so willingly without reservation. And, like St Andrew, we must remember that we are barely worthy to serve Jesus and not consider ourselves better than we are.

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