Quarterly Essay 51 The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell
as controversial as QEs should be
Marr's chronicling of pertinent events is as complete, candid and frank as the essay format allows. He reacts to evidence to test its validity and seeks to analyse rather than nit-pick. As he pieces together George Pell's life, he paints a recognisable portrait that few readers would challenge. However no writer can enter the mind of the subject to completely reveal the unabashed truth and motives so critical to finish the story. Pell would not be interviewed, but reading between the lines in Marr's essay makes it clear that this would be unlikely to offer the epiphany this essay seeks. So the reader is left details from decades, in fact generations, of all but proven crimes to society's vulnerable. The role of `the Prince' in detecting, resolving and accounting for the crimes of others is made fairly clear, but his inner thoughts require greater conjecture. Marr offers the reader his now characteristic summation in the final pages of this essay, and these are neither flattering nor optimistic for the Prince or his institution in its current form in Australia, or perhaps even globally. The directions chosen by the new Pope would seem to confirm this.
This essay is a tour de force encapsulating a charismatic subject. It will leave the reader a little queasy when weighing up one life, from publican's son to Oxford don and through the timeless, vertiginous and dizzying landscape of Vatican lore, against thousands of other lives irredeemably changed by the hubris of the few.