Ya know what we really don’t need? A jailhouse memoir from Cardinal George Pell. And yet, the man’s just given his first interview since returning to Rome in order to spruik the damn thing.
In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, Pell talked all about his work cleaning up corruption and stamping out embezzlement as the Vatican Treasurer, but made almost no mention of the allegations against him back home.
“I didn’t know that there was so much criminality involved,” he said… about the Catholic Church’s financial affairs.
However, Pell did hint at a possible connection between his anti-corruption crusade in Rome and being sent back to Australia to stand trial on pedophilia charges, which were eventually overturned by the High Court.
Did people in the church want him gone? Was it a Mafia job? Could be, according to Pell.
“Some Australian people, my own family, said to me: ‘Well, if the Mafia is going after you or somebody else is going after you, that’s one thing’,” he said.
“It’s a little bit worse if it comes from within the church.”
The interview also described Pell’s “rather brusque, no-nonsense Australian sensibilities” which, if you’ve ever seen Pell talk, is enough to make Aussie readers deeply ashamed of their own conversational demeanor.
The West Australian newspaper also published excerpts from an advance copy of the book, adding that the memoir’s unlikely to change minds on either side.
“The pedophilia crisis remains the greatest blow the church has suffered in Australia,” Pell wrote in one excerpts shared by the newspaper.
“If anyone in the mid-nineties knew the extent of the problem, they did not say so publicly, or to me privately. We thought the Melbourne Response would finish its work in a few years.”
We also learn the things Pell hated the most during his time in jail: routine stirp-searches, getting verbally abused by other inmates who he couldn’t even see, and not having a broom to sweep his cell.
The upcoming prison diary, due out December 15, will apparently give Pell’s personal insight into the trial process and then an account of the first five months of the 404 days he spend in solitary confinement.
It’s being published by American Catholic publisher Ignatius Press, which hopes the profits can help pay Pell’s legal fees.
In one of the reviews listed on the publisher’s website, the Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan literally compared Pell to Martin Luther King Jr. and “Jesus himself”.
This is just the first volume of Pell’s story. There’ll (unfortunately) be more books to come.
