Where are the prayers for Pell?

The Vatican Press Office's response yesterday to Cardinal George Pell's conviction -- which he is appealing -- was terse and very carefully worded, reading that the verdict "shocked many people, not only in Australia," and expressing unity with the Australian bishops in "praying for all victims of abuse."

The thought that I haven't been able to put out of my mind as I read and then reread the statement: Where are the prayers for Pell?

Image from WikiCommons

I know, I know. Even if Cardinal Pell has maintained his innocence, and even if both his friends and even his enemies are scratching their heads and trying to figure out how on earth he could have been convicted -- even then, the Vatican's response needed to be very, very carefully modulated. The Church can't be seen as taking the side of a priest or even an archbishop and a cardinal just because he is "one of their own." Such optics would be devastating to the argument that the Church is fully committed addressing the institutional cronyism that led to the shuffling around of abusive priests and the turning of a blind eye to the flagrant abuses of power of the likes of now-Mister McCarrick.

As much as I am eager to see the Church's swamp cleared and her wound cauterized, I am deeply fearful of the collateral damage being wreaked on the faithful clergy in the trenches. In my mind I'm thinking, what if he's innocent? To repeat, even Pell's enemies can't make sense of how the evidence has been twisted into anything plausible. So in my mind I'm imagining an elderly man who has given his entire life to the service of Christ being remanded today into police custody for the sort of heinous crime of child sexual abuse that, ironically, he was among the first in Australia to recognize as a major problem.

Pell's going to jail is bad enough, especially when Mr. McCarrick remains free and clear with no chance of doing jail time. My cri-de-coeur today, however, runs deeper. It seems to be that the anger of faithful Catholics at this despicable mess has run so deep that bishops and clergy are now too cowed to express any sort of solidarity with their own who stand among the accused. Again, I understand the rock-and-a-hard-place situation that generated the Vatican's terse statement. I understand the blow-back that any sort of expression of solidarity would have evoked. But the Vatican's statement reeks of lawyer-like risk management, not Christian compassion.

I met Cardinal Pell just one time when I was a seminarian studying in Rome. It was at one of the Lenten station churches, an early morning Mass. Maybe I served that Mass, or maybe I was just in the right place at the right moment as he headed into the sacristy, but I distinctly remember shaking his hand and wishing him a good morning. He's a towering figure, not only in his blunt rhetoric, but in his six-foot, three-inches stature. The point is, whether he's far away in Australia or not, Cardinal Pell is not an abstract idea to me. When I think of him being taken into custody, I'm thinking of a real person, and I'm thinking that I'd like him to know that I'm praying for him.

In sum, there's something unchristian about the way the Church has found it necessary, in this sex abuse crisis, to wash her hands of her own when they become a liability, at least publicly. Cardinal Pell is a particularly glaring case because the general consensus is that there is a miscarriage of justice occurring right now in Australia. Laypeople like myself and George Weigel, whose article is linked above, can say so openly. But not a brother bishop. Search around the news sites for any Australian bishops, many of them proteges of Pell, who, despite the improbability of the charges, have publicly stated that they're praying for their elderly confrere. I haven't found a single one.

I want the swamp cleared as much as any Catholic layman. But our leaders in the faith have been utterly cowed. I see bishops quickly washing their hands of their accused priests, their co-workers in the vineyard who have placed their hands in the hands of their bishop and promised obedience for life; I see bishops, who are successors of the apostles, washing their hands of their accused brethren, at least publicly. Browse around and read the antiseptic, lawyerly statements if you don't believe me. What have we brought about by means of our righteous anger?