National
For whom the Pell trolls
Oh my gawd. How embarassment. My Jesuit mates have been tearing their hairshirts out.
Richard Dawkins, who doesn’t believe in gods, Santa Claus, Santa Lucia, or Cardinal George Pell’s facile argument, was clearly losing patience with his intellectual inferior. So was I. It was a no contest.
The Catholic Church came off third best on Monday’s Q&A on ABC TV.
As penance, I counsel George Pell to recite five Acts of Contrition, 14 Hail Marys, because he clearly loathes marianists; read a couple of Ikea church of assembly kit instructions based on the dead sea scrolls; Dr Barbara Thiering’s ‘Jesus the Man’; the Pesher Technique; and one or two Lords Prayers, just for bringing the Catholic Church into even more disrepute.
George Pell and his intimate circle, known as the Spice Girls have shoved their fundamentalist joyless, homophobic and misogynist nonsense down the parched throats of Australian Catholicism for too long.
His infantile protectionism of the children of the book and the Old and New Testaments on Q&A, was a demeaning representation of a faith that I have long filed under ‘never to be opened unless by a female Catholic priest’.
Pell has so much in common with seriously whacky Imams, Reverends and Rabbis and Presidential candidates, whose fundamentalist rigid posture indicts their own religions as being incapable of withstanding mere mortal scrutiny and debate.
Frankly, I was shocked at Pell’s dismal theological performance. After all, it is no secret Pell once harboured ambitions to be the first Australian Pope. Forget it, George.
The nearest Australia ever came to occupying the throne of the Vicar of Christ was with the shearer’s son, the late Archbishop Sir Guilford Young, of Hobart — a towering intellect, orator and humanist.
Such was the facile nature of debate between Dawkins and Pell, that it is unworthy of serious academic analysis, at least on this day.
Even the most blinkered and devoted Catholic must have been cringing at this preacher man – who holds Catholicism’s highest title and is the Pope’s main man in Australia – and his simplistic ravings.
Once, all roads might indeed have led to Rome, but increasingly for thinking Catholics, the roads less travelled bring greater comfort and humanity and make more sense.
I was astounded at Pell’s extraordinary attitude and seeming denigration of the Jews.