Cardinal Pell & the Neocats

 

Cardinal George Pell will likely long be remembered as a hero among the more conservative circles of the Church. He was, as his friends at The Pillar stated, "a defender of orthodox Catholic doctrine and an articulate spokesman for the evangelical and social mission of the Church." He attempted to tackle the apparent corruption of the Vatican's finances. He endured a lengthy prison sentence for crimes for which he was ultimately judged innocent. He rightly recognized the "toxic nightmare" of the ongoing German "Synodal Way."

But ultimately, this is not a eulogy for the late Cardinal, though through God's mercy, may he rest in peace. This is not a biography and, though this blog finds much to admire about his character, certainly neither is it a hagiography.

This is the story of a good man and the bad men that he (knowingly or unknowingly) supported.

If the Church remains faithful to Christ, Pell said in a 2020 interview, there's always the chance that new forces of renewal and leadership will arise.

I think this happened already in the last century through Opus Dei, the Neocatechumenal Way, just as it did in the 16th Century with the Jesuits, in the 13th Century with the Dominicans and the Franciscans, and earlier with the Benedictines.

According to Cardinal Pell, the Neocatechumenal Way is actively transforming the Church for the better, just as St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Dominic, St. Francis, and St. Benedict did in the past. Kiko and St. Josemaría Escrivá are apparently cut from the same cloth.

Praise indeed. Those are no small, negligible comparisons.

The Way is also repeatedly mentioned in Pell's prison memoirs. He opened a Redemptoris Mater seminary for them in Sydney in 2001. In the picture below, you see him seated at a 2011 Mass at the Way's Domus Galilaeae in Israel (he's seated on the far right between the late Venezuelan Cardinal Urosa and, of all people, Ted McCarrick):

His connection to and affection for Kiko's movement clearly run deep.

We go now to St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Redfern, a suburb of Sydney less than 3 miles south of the famed Opera House. Though gentrification has come to the area in recent years, the neighborhood is generally considered "inner city," with all the usual socio-economic challenges that term usually entails.

For over 30 years, starting in the early 70s, Fr. Tom Kennedy was the pastor of this parish. One of its defining features was its outreach ministry to the Aboriginal people. It was a parish commited to social justice for the outcast. As one local publication phrased it:

Anyone who knows St. Vincent's parish in Redfern knows it is as idiosyncratic as much as of the area that surrounds it. Parishioners include some of the most marginalised people in Sydney as well as some of the more well-heeled. Tales of disruptions and interjections of various kinds during Mass are legendary, and over the years the unorthodox use of church property to meet local needs has put the parish on a collision course with the archdiocese.

In other words, casting no aspersions on the good works and Christian witness this parish managed to bring to its inner-city community, one might very easily and still charitably call this parish "liberally-minded." When dealing with a conservative like George Pell, who ran the Sydney Archdiocese from 2001 to 2014, one might easily imagine what sort of "collision course" this parish community may have been on.

In a 2007 letter to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, then Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, one St. Vincent's parishioner picks up the story:

When a sick and frail Fr. Kennedy retired in 2002, Archbishop Cardinal George Pell promised him that he would respect the special place that St. Vincent's had become and ensure that his legacy would continue. Instead, the Cardinal sent clergy with a very different agenda to Redfern, culminating in the extraordinary appointment, in July 2003, of Fr. Gerry Prindiville of the Neocatechumenal Way.

For some perspective here, we turn again to our local publication:

Prindiville's appointment must be viewed in the wider context of Cardinal George Pell's attempts to rein in independently minded priests and their parishioners, and to reaffirm a rigid Catholic orthodoxy throughout the Sydney Archdiocese.

So we might explain the situation like this. A conservative archbishop, recently installed in Australia's largest diocese in its largest city, wants to do a little housecleaning. He knows of a parish that has been "doing its own thing" for 30 years, and wants to restore some law and order. He wants to restore Catholic orthodoxy to a place where it appears to have been lacking for a long while. So, he calls on the Neocatechumenal Way: the "conservative restorationists" of the Catholic Church. His motives, arguably, are sincere, even if he perhaps lacks full understanding of the situation. But, what happens next?

We'll let the people of St. Vincent's explain:

The priests of the Neocatechumenal Way have withdrawn the Saturday parish vigil Mass and replaced it with one held in their presbytery, where we feel most unwelcome; they removed the tabernacle from the Church to a tiny locked room in the sacristy where it can only be venerated by a chosen few; they regularly deny members of the community the Eucharist; they have verbally and physically assaulted us; they have threatened us and shattered and ignored our traditions and cultures. Fr. Prindiville himself on several occasions has walked angrily out of Masses that he was saying, leaving the congregation stranded. And all the while they preach at us about our sinfulness.

The priests behave in a manner that has been, and continues to be, divisive, deceitful, abusive and intolerant. They deny the existence of Aborigines in the parish and refuse to be enculturated, disregarding Aboriginal culture and spirituality...

After approximately eighteen months of documented snide remarks, verbal abuse, vicious comments, illegal threats, intimidation, physical violence and malicious damage to property, one of our women parishioners who had borne the brunt of some particularly nasty, public and defamatory verbal abuse, submitted a case of defmation against the assistant priest [Fr. Dennis Sudla] to the Tribunal of the Catholic Church of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. The judgment found in favour of the parishioner... While no explanation has been offered, the priest in question has not been seen in the parish since the issuing of the first notice. His successor [Fr. Joe Pelle] is similarly unenculturated, hostile, and contemptuous of the community's long term liturgical practices and pastoral concerns...

In our experience the Neocatechumenal Way is divisive and harmful. The Church is not enriched by their fundamentalist, sect-like practices... The appointment of men whose pastoral interest and theological and missiological training seem to be woefully inadequate, and who appear not to have been assessed for their leadership qualities, can only bring heartache to a parish and stress to the individual priests. Such poor formation can only besmirch Catholics everywhere.

Nearly a decade later, the stories hadn't changed much, as The Thoughtful Catholic reports in some depth.

So, while Cardinal Pell may have had good intentions to bring the "liberal and wayward" parish of St. Vincent's to heel with his "conservative" Neocat friends, does it sound like that's what happened? Or does it sound like the all-too-familiar scenario that seems to happen wherever the Apostles of Kiko go?

How, you might ask, did Cardinal Pell respond? The parishioners explain:

We are saddened by the dismissive attitude of so much of the Church towards fair and honest criticism. We are bewildered by the fact that our Archbishop has made no effort to listen to and genuinely work with us towards equitable solutions... Time and time again we've pleaded with Cardinal Pell for help. Time and time again he has dismissed or ignored our complaints about the Neocatechumenate priests. And all the while he has been misrepresenting the situation and vilifying us publicly in the press, and in his letters.

"The priests continue to be strongly opposed by a small rump, but they have no problems with the local people, both indigenous and non-indigenous... The relationship between parishioners and the priests, seminarians, and families of the Neocatechumenal Way are [sic] basically very good." (Letter of Card. Pell, 23 May 2006)

Cardinal Pell has never acknowledged the Tribunal findings [regarding Fr. Sudla] to us. We understand that he is often overseas and therefore very hard to contact, but we are deeply distressed that he has still not acknowledged a letter, signed by 120 members of the community, which was sent to him in May 2006.

The parishioners go on to say that because of their experience, they were able to establish contact with parishes in Perth, on the opposite side of the country, that had similarly struggled with the Neocatechumenal Way, even with a couple of the same priests.

In May 2021, St. Vincent's parish was merged with two other parishes to form the Sydney City South parish. The pastor's not a Neocat anymore, but the Neocats are still alive and well and living in Redfern. Though we hope the community continues to thrive, we must certainly recognize that it's always a sad day when a once-thriving parish is reduced to a part of a cluster. And we must wonder: could this fate have been avoided if instead of the Neocats, Cardinal Pell had managed to find a priest that was both committed to Catholic orthodoxy as well as Fr. Tom Kennedy's pastoral care to the marginalized and disenfranchised?

[An interesting side note about the aforementioned Fr. Gerry Prindiville: The letters from the parishioners of St. Vincent's indicate that he was replaced as pastor there in 2007, after an obviously tumultuous four-year tenure. He currently serves as the spiritual director of Sydney's RMS--so obviously he's earned his promotion over the years, in spite of early difficulties. What this blog finds most interesting, though, is his résumé: although he's a native Australian, he went to seminary at RMS Newark and was ordained for that Archdiocese in 1995 by (we can only logically assume) Ted McCarrick. In the four years immediately prior to coming to St. Vincent's, guess where he was doing missionary work? The Turks and Caicos! Small world, isn't it?]

Returning to our main story: In a none-too-flattering article, The Guardian reports of Cardinal Pell:

He was a company man. He did what he did to preserve the power and the assets of the church [sic]. If that meant thrashing victims of abuse through the courts and boxing them into tiny settlements, that was fine by him. Duty done.

This blog will recognize a kernel of truth in that statement: Pell was a man who deeply loved the Church, and was committed to go to great lengths to preserve and defend Her. Unfortunately, he may not always have had the clearest vision for doing so, as the same Guardian piece relates the all-too-familiar tale of downplaying clerical abuse under his watch.

And, he clearly lacked the vision to see the Neocatechumenal Way for what it was, and still is. Was the Cardinal deeply complicit in the Way's activities? Was he perhaps trading his silence for the opportunity to use the Way's deep coffers to fund his orthodox renaissance? Or was he just naively trusting, seeing only what he wanted to see--a superficially conservative movement in the Church that achieved big conversion numbers and didn't fuss about doctrine?

We do not begin to speculate how much of the "true" Way Cardinal Pell really understood. Nor do we begin to speculate on how much other "conservative" prelates truly understand--e.g. Cardinal Stafford, Archbishop Chaput, or Archbishop Aquila.

We simply remark that conservative stalwarts like George Pell have made and continue to make the Neocatechumenal Way what it is today, and this is largely why so many otherwise orthodox Catholics, both lay and clerical, are dodgy about critiquing it too harshly. After all, if men such as Cardinal Pell are for it, who am I to be against it?

Cardinal Pell was both a good man and a sinful man. He has now been judged by his Creator. We do not seek to add to that judgment. But understand: no matter how good and holy a man may be, we must never let hero worship get in the way of honest criticism, and recognize that even the best of men can err in judgment.

It happened to John Paul II. It happened to Benedict. It happened to George Pell. It's happening to other men every day. Let's wake up.