George Pell’s political legacy: why the Catholic warrior ultimately lost on marriage equality, climate and abortion

In the hours after George Pell’s death, a steady stream of politicians rushed to pay tribute.

Between the former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard, current Liberal leader Peter Dutton, former treasurer Joe Hockey and federal and state Liberal backbenchers, Pell was variously described as a “saint”, a man of “great integrity”, a “martyr”, and “a strong and determined religious leader” who “displayed consistent courage” in the face of unjust political persecution.

The tributes, all silent on the child abuse royal commission’s damning findings about Pell, served as a reminder of his influence over Australian political life.

As a warrior for Catholic conservatism and the most senior churchman in Australian history, Pell forged deep relationships with conservative political leaders like Howard and Abbott, and was afforded a degree of power and influence few other religious leaders could boast.

The Australian Catholic University senior research fellow Miles Pattenden, a religious historian and scholar, says Pell’s power as a political force “shouldn’t be underestimated”.

“He had the admiration, perhaps even adulation, of major figures in the Australian Liberal party over an extended period. Witness Tony Abbott’s call yesterday for us to see him as a ‘saint for our times’,” Pattenden says.

“He was certainly a spiritual guide for many conservative Australian politicians even if he did not direct how or when they voted on specific policies.”

But, like much of his life, assessing Pell’s political legacy is not straightforward.

His unquestionable power within the church and his ability to bend the ear of conservative leaders was not enough to stave off progress on issues Pell saw as threats to traditional Catholicism.

On the key issues of his time – marriage equality, climate change and abortion – Pell’s power was tempered by a church rapidly diminished in terms of following and moral authority.

“I would say part of Pell’s skill as a political operator was knowing the limitations of his position,” Pattenden says.

“Like many other senior Catholics of his generation, he recognised that the faithful could not easily be mobilised just by bishops telling them what to do.

“Pell therefore became a vigorous advocate for the positions he favoured. The majority of Australians didn’t find his arguments or tone persuasive, but plenty apparently did.”

George Pell actively lobbied the government against same-sex marriage and called abortion a worse moral failing than clergy abuse. The then Sydney archbishop speaks to the media in 2002. Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP

In 2001, years before he joined the marriage equality campaign, Peter Furness was working as a local councillor on the South Sydney city council.

The council was involved in approvals for a planned medically supervised injecting centre in Kings Cross when the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic congregation, suddenly withdrew from plans to operate it.

“It was Pell who decided … to, with no notice, instruct the Sisters of Charity, who were to operate the facility, to withdraw from the project,” Furness says. “The Uniting church took over, leaving the obedient sisters disgruntled.”

He seemed sceptical towards arguments that Church teachings on these issues have evolved, and therefore always will evolve

Almost a decade later, Furness, now the acting national convener of Australian Marriage Equality, again ran into direct political opposition from Pell.

Furness had written to the Pell, by that stage cardinal and archbishop of Sydney, seeking a meeting and assurances that “in their clerical capacity, Catholic clergy will not actively campaign against civil marriage for same-sex partners”.

“In short, just as we respect your right to not marry same-sex partners in religious ceremonies, we ask that you respect our right to marry under civil law,” Furness wrote. “We understand that some of the clergy who are using their clerical role to advocate against reform may not be under your direct authority as Archbishop of Sydney, but we write to you, nonetheless, because of the authority your role as Cardinal gives you in the Australian Catholic church.”

Pell said he would not do so.

“I can assure you that I have no intention of impeding any priest who wants to work with their people in actively campaigning against same-sex marriage in Australia,” he said.

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He offered to meet Furness, but only on the proviso that he acknowledged the church’s position on same-sex marriage was not “a form of prejudice and discrimination”.

“Always a little condescending, in his last email he suggested a meeting at his office where I could meet a married (opposite-sex) couple who could explain in their own words how important marriage was to them,” Furness remembers. “When I agreed and promised to bring a same-sex couple to do the same, he simply cut off all correspondence without explanation.”

Pell actively lobbied the government against same-sex marriage. He told a Senate inquiry that the government should oppose it because it was cruel to “deliberately deprive” children of a father and a mother.

He described abortion as a worse moral failing than clergy abuse, and used similarly extreme language in his opposition to climate change, describing it as a form of paganism.

“In the past, pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods,” he said. “Today, they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.”

Pattenden, a religious scholar with extensive knowledge of Pell, says he was a “galvanising force” on the issues of same-sex marriage and climate.

And yet, on these issues, he ultimately failed to convince mainstream Australians or halt political and societal support for change.

Marriage equality became law after an overwhelming majority expressed support for it and polling continues to show the vast majority of Australians see climate change as a serious and pressing problem that requires urgent action, even if it involves significant costs.

Pattenden says Pell’s view, on moral questions, seemed to be that it “wasn’t for the current generation of Catholics to change the teachings which had been developed by previous generations unilaterally because the Universal Church contains not just the living but the dead and the unborn”.

“He seemed sceptical towards arguments that Church teachings on these issues have evolved, and therefore always will evolve, over time.”

That trait held true right until the last. Six months ago, in an increasingly rare public contribution, Pell gave an interview to a German Catholic television agency to publicly admonish German Catholics who suggested the church change its teachings on homosexuality.

In 2021, he had issued a similar condemnation when German Catholics planned to hold a day of blessings for same-sex partners.

The nation’s bishops were responding to a crisis years in the making. Catholics were abandoning the church in Germany in record numbers and, in 2021, less than half the country belonged to a church for the first time in the nation’s history.

Pell said the German Catholics, by advocating for a more liberal approach, were heading “in the wrong direction”.

“By that, I mean it is quite clear that a liberalized Christianity, whether it is a liberalized Catholicism or Protestantism, in a generation or so merges into agnosticism,” he said.

“If you adopt the policies of the world and just go along so that they approve, nobody is going to be interested in that.”