Quotes by George Milligan

“Ballarat survivor Andrew Collins, watching in the room in Rome, said the first word that came into his mind was 'empathy'. 'To me it showed that he [Cardinal George Pell, giving evidence before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse] struggled to show any,' Collins says. 'We didn't see it as a blunder, as he thinks carefully before he speaks and is very intelligent and articulate. This is just how his mind works. If it's not about him, involving him or of benefit to him, then it hardly registers.””

“The Chair [Justice Peter McClellan, former Chair of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse] seemed to see where he was going with this. 'Cardinal, you keep referencing back to authority and structural responsibility, but it is the case, isn't it, that within the Church you would expect and indeed might I suggest the community would expect - that each priest would act responsibly, regardless of their position?"He was met again with some vintage obfuscation, capped off with a familiar Pell trope: you people just don't understand my Church. 'To understand the Catholic Church's structure and who has authority, you go to Church law, and according to the canon law of the Church, you can there identify the different levels of responsibility - it might be a jurisdictional responsibility; it might be a moral responsibility at different levels. But it's from the canon law that you decide what the situation is within the Church.'And here the Chair got to the nub of Pell's true thinking on this, the bubble he finds himself in, where the ordinary rules of morality, decency and even criminal responsibility are leavened to varying degrees by byzantine Church structures. (p.203)””

“[Former Bishop of Ballarat Ronald] Mulkearns appealed to Pope John Paul II about what to do about child sexual abuse - he wanted, says [Former Corpus Christi seminarian Michael] Costigan, 'some direction or counselling'. 'He said the Pope would not talk to him about it', Costigan says. 'He said the Pope turned his back and walked out of the room.' ... 'It wasn't long after he came back that he stood down as Bishop.' (p.189)””

“Some of those watching believed answers like this - which dominated Pell's evidence as well as [former Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane Brian] Finnigan's and many of the other priests - to be a form of 'mental reservation' or in the Latin. It's a theological strategy dating back centuries, which involves the idea of truths 'expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind'. As the theory goes, lying is considered a sin. But a Christian's ethical duty is to tell truth to God - reserving or restricting part of that truth from human ears is ethically sound if it serves the greater good. (p.185)””

“Pell is unable to project a convincing sense of compassion, reform and healing. ... Pell looms as a huge liability in the institutional crisis ow facing the Catholic Church in Australia. ( journalist Paul Kelly, quoted on p.125)””

“I can testify from my own experience the Church covers up, silences victims, hinders police investigations, alerts offenders, destroys evidence and moves priests to protect the good name of the Church. ( journalist Joanne McCarthy, quoted on p.124)””

“The exercise of power became a constant feature of those years. And those who disagreed with Pell on matters theological or spiritual felt thoroughly marginalised. As the 2000s wore on, it was not just a case of Pell necessarily exercising the power himself, but that he had remade the Australian Church in his image. Dissent was actively discouraged, discussion about subjects he had declared off limits was avoided. (p.115)””

“Pell, a leader of a faith-based organisation, acquiesced in a process where his rolled-gold lawyers, whom he instructed to go hard, spent an inordinate amount of money defending Church coffers against a man who had been abused by a dodgy priest with other victims. (p.114)””