As Cardinal Pell Is Buried, He's Acclaimed a "Saint for Our Times," While Abuse Survivors and LGBTQ People Protest

As Rod McGuirk reports, as Cardinal Pell's funeral is held today, police have refused to permit LGBTQ-rights protesters outside the Catholic cathedral in Sydney, and have sought a court injunction against them.

Pell famously refused to meet with his lesbian cousin, a former nun, to discuss Catholic teaching that LGBTQ human beings are "intrinsically disordered." "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," he said as he refused communion to a gay activist.

As AJ McDougall and Barbie Latza Nadeau report,

One protest organizer told The Guardian that it was "pretty grotesque that someone who’s an arch defender of homophobia, sexism, who said abortion is a worse moral scandal than priests abusing children, gets to have a celebration of his life."

And, as protesters decry Cardinal Pell's hateful approach to LGBTQ human beings and his complicity in protecting priests sexually abusing children, which the Australian Royal Commission report exposed, former Australian PM Tony Abbott calls Pell "a saint for our times." 

Simon Hunt writes,

Like many, I was disgusted by the history-erasing hagiographies that followed the death of Cardinal George Pell – declaring his actions to be saint-like; comparing him to a crucified Christ who had died at the hands of "political correctness"; claiming that he had gone to jail for having had the temerity to "talk back to the culture". Akin to the worst, two-bit fairground magic act in history, these op-eds simply focused on the High Court setting aside Pell’s personal conviction for child abuse, and completely ignored his decades-long enabling of paedophile priests through a career-long inaction, as documented and summarised in the final royal commission report.

Ben Doherty reports,

At the conclusion of the three-hour [Pell funeral] mass, 275 priests and 75 seminarians led the processional out on to the contested ground of College Street. 

These 275 priests and 75 seminarians were all men, almost all of them white men. For whose interests did Pell stand, one has to ask? as one weighs the symbolism here.