Dressed in scarlet garments, the blood-like red representing his willingness to die for his beliefs, Cardinal George Pell wore his faith as blatantly as he could.
A gold ring adorned the index finger of his right hand, gifted to him by the Pope himself, and kissed by Catholics all over the world who greeted him.
With a zuchetti sitting on the crown of his head, a scarlet hat indicating his willingness to spill blood for his church, Pell asserted himself as not just a Catholic, but as the highest ranking one in Australia.
But we learned on Tuesday that George Pell is not a Catholic at all.
The 77-year-old has been found guilty of five counts of child sex abuse.
He is a man who proclaims himself as one thing and acts as another. A wolf in sheep’s clothing – to use a phrase from the bible.
Pell does not represent the one in five Australian students who attend Catholic schools or the 60,000 teachers who run them. He does not represent the more than five and half million Australians who identify as Catholic – not because they wear a crucifix – but because of how they choose to live their lives.
A Catholic is my grandmother, who buried her husband, her brother and her son, and would speak to God when she found herself crying in the middle of the night.
A Catholic is my grandfather, who says God found him rather than the other way around, and who thinks the single most important question you can ask yourself is: ‘Am I a good person?’
Top Comments
Sorry, but the abuse of children in the Catholic Church is very much a Catholic thing. It was able to continue because of the secrecy, because priests live unnaturally, because the idea of confession being private was more important than actual justice being done and because they were allowed to operate outside the law. The whole institution is corrupt and the belief in a Catholic god goes hand in hand with this institution. It is so abhorrent and I am pretty sick of hearing Catholics carry on about their "faith" being attacked when it is their faith that allowed this to happen. How many "good" Catholics turned a blind eye? How many told their abused kids to shut up and not badmouth the priest? How many defended priests who were clearly abusing children, unable to let themselves believe that these were just men (as all priests are, they are not representative of god on earth, that is ridiculous) who were using the church to have access to children?
Modern religions took the bible and cherry picked parts of it, including metaphors that weren't meant to be taken literally and now we've ended up with the sexist, divisive, violent culture we live in today.