It all sounds a bit Anglican. And it is no exaggeration.

The Church is all about at the moment. Having lost its exemplar theologian, peerless scholar, German Shepherd and reluctant pontiff, Joseph Ratzinger, in the dying hours of 2022, this year began with the shocking news, especially for Australian believers, that Cardinal George Pell had died suddenly following routine surgery in Rome.

KILLED

Yes, he did trust Vatican medicos and no, they there is no evidence they killed him.

George Pell was, quite simply, the greatest Catholic Churchman in Australia’s history. And more sinned against than sinning.

“Divisive”, “controversial”, they say. Whenever I see these words, I interpret them as “enemy of the Left”, “has a spine” and “stands up for principle”.

Former Aussie PM Tony Abbott, admittedly not an unbiased observer, called Pell a “saint for our times”.

I prefer to remember him as Australia’s white martyr. He didn’t shed his blood for Christ, but he may as well have, such was the suffering he endured most of his adult life.

You could say he took one for the team. You would get few objecting if you described Pell as Australia’s most hated man. Certainly, by the progressive clerisy that runs the public square.

Privately, many people saw him as the happy warrior for his Christian beliefs, and so to be admired.

Another cohort may not have shared his stern, muscular Catholicism, but saw through the trumped-up charges of sexual abuse that saw him jailed for 404 days, and so were pleased when, in 2020, Australia’s High Court removed the stain on his character by unanimously exonerating him of all charges.

The Get-Pell brigade ensconced in Leftist politics, the ABC, various progressive newspapers, embittered abuse survivor groups, priest-chasing law firms, the universities and Victoria Police, were simply taking a sabbatical after Pell’s acquittal, only to resume vicious hostilities since his untimely death.

Sadly, they have been assisted by useful idiots who continue to blame Pell personally for all of Australia’s past, tawdry Catholic sexual abuse.

ABUSE

They are in august company, since the Royal Commission examining child abuse (which reported in 2017, and whose redacted, Pell-related findings were released in May 2020) took a similar position, condemning Pell for not doing enough to stem the tide of abuse.

“He should have known”, they said. Thus ignoring three things.

There is no actual evidence he knew about the abuse. Second, he had no jurisdiction to act outside his own dioceses. And third, when he did become Archbishop of Melbourne (in 1996), he enacted Australian Catholicism’s first ever process for bringing justice to the abused. And a robust process it was.

He sacked dozens of priests accused of child abuse. He was, in fact, a Catholic hero who should have been lauded for his efforts. But he was a conservative!

The Cardinal’s death – among his many friends and supporters in Australia, he is simply known as “the Cardinal” – has had other significance that has nothing to do with his own battles.

It brings us back to Damian Thompson, who published in The Spectator a posthumous piece by Pell excoriating the ideologies driving the forthcoming Catholic Synods on “Synodality”.

Not only that, the impeccably informed Roman journalist Sandro Magister has revealed that Pell was “Demos”, a formerly anonymous critic of the Church of Francis who wrote an even more damning critique of the current pontificate, which Demos described as “catastrophic”.

This after the Pope, initially an ally of Pell’s in the latter’s brief to clean up the Vatican’s finances, had kindly described his cardinal as “a great man”.

Taken together, George Pell’s articles are a damning critique of the universal Church’s direction and, in particular, of the dire consequences of Synodality.

Damian Thompson introduced the Cardinal’s Spectator article as follows: “Shortly before he died on Tuesday, Cardinal George Pell wrote the following article for The Spectator in which he denounced the Vatican’s plans for its forthcoming ‘Synod on Synodality’ as a ‘toxic nightmare’.

“The booklet produced by the Synod, to be held in two sessions this year and next year, is ‘one of the most incoherent documents ever sent out from Rome’, says Pell.

“Not only is it ‘couched in neo-Marxist jargon’, but it is ‘hostile to the apostolic tradition’ and ignores such fundamental Christian tenets as belief in divine judgment, heaven and hell.

“The Australian-born cardinal, who endured the terrible ordeal of imprisonment in his home country on fake charges of sex abuse before being acquitted, was nothing if not courageous.

“He did not know that he was about to die when he wrote this piece; he was prepared to face the fury of Pope Francis and the organisers when it was published. As it is, his sudden death may add extra force to his words when the synod meets this October.”

In The Spectator piece, Pell himself states: “With no sense of irony, the [45 page “discernment” Synod] document is entitled ‘Enlarge the Space of Your Tent’, and the aim of doing so is to accommodate, not the newly baptised – those who have answered the call to repent and believe – but anyone who might be interested enough to listen. Participants are urged to be welcoming and radically inclusive: ‘No one is excluded’.”

This is the church of “the big tent”. All are welcome but they need not have been uncatechised. No one is excluded, but none need be converted.

A big, ignorant tent, then. But what is “synodality”? Who the heck knows? Whatever the revolutionaries want it to mean, I’m guessing.

Pell had a crack at a definition: “According to this recent update of the good news, ‘synodality’ as a way of being for the Church is not to be defined, but just to be lived. It revolves around five creative tensions, starting from radical inclusion and moving towards mission in a participatory style, practicing ‘co-responsibility with other believers and people of good will’.

DIFFICULTIES

“Difficulties are acknowledged, such as war, genocide and the gap between clergy and laity, but all can be sustained,” say the Bishops, “by a lively spirituality.”

Good luck with that. What of Pell’s (assumed) Demos piece?

Here is one report of the Demos memo to fellow Cardinals: “The memo continues on the theme of papal clarity by addressing the confusion of the ongoing German Synodal Path. Heterodox Cdl Jean-Claude Hollerich and the persecution of traditional Catholics are given as examples.

“The German synod speaks of homosexuality, of women priests, of communion for the divorced. And the papacy is silent. Cardinal Hollerich rejects Christian teaching on sexuality. And the papacy is silent. This is doubly significant because the cardinal is explicitly a heretic; he doesn’t use code words or innuendos…

“The ex-Anglicans among us are right to identify the deepening confusion, the attack on traditional morals and the insertion into the dialogue of neo-Marxist jargon about exclusion, alienation, identity, marginalisation, the voiceless, LGBTQ as well as the displacement of Christian notions of forgiveness, sin, sacrifice, healing, redemption.

“Why the silence on the afterlife of reward or punishment, on the four last things; death and judgement, heaven and hell?”

As always, then, George pulled no punches. And he is correct to point out the synodal process’s sins of omission. It is both the process of “synodality”, its underpinnings – “a potpourri of New Age goodwill” – and the likely heterodox outcomes to which Pell and other critics of the Synod approach have the gravest of objections.

Close Vatican watchers will already know that the pontificate of the Peronist Francis, the candidate of the Left-liberal “St Gallen mafia”, has been akin to a woke, globalist, progressive, green dream come true.

Forget about abortion and euthanasia (for example). Let’s worry about … climate change! Not worrying about climate change is a sin. Moving the Church to a synodal model will simply seal the deal. As I said, all very Anglican. And very post-modern.

As someone wise opined, synodality means an attempted transfer of power in the Church from the global to the local, and from the Bishops to the laity. But, more importantly, to a particular caste of the laity.

No nods to tradition and core doctrine here. Throw out the traditions of the Church, its once beautiful liturgy, its Christo-centrism and its defence of truth, in season and out.

Leave the fate of core beliefs of the Church of Christ and the Apostles to committees of the loud and the disgruntled. The world is run by those who turn up. And it is the revolutionaries, who have the most to change, who will turn up.

The two devastating opinion pieces by the Cardinal show that even in death, he himself continues to speak loudly and carry a big stick.

CONCLAVE

Will his words influence the next Papal Conclave? Given that Francis, effectively, has rigged the vote for the next Pope through his Cardinal-appointments, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Pell’s timely intervention from the grave to deliver an anti-Francis candidate next time around. (A unifier and a truth-teller would be nice, at least).

Yet there appear to be growing sources of disquiet in the Church around the globe about the direction of the present pontificate outside the usual traditionalist and orthodox Catholic suspects.

There are straws in the wind suggesting that the unofficial opposition to Francis is stirring, even absent George Pell’s visceral contributions. The African Cardinal Robert Sarah has spoken movingly about Benedict.

This was in contrast to the Pope’s grumpy, even surly efforts before, during and after Benedict’s funeral. There was no period of mourning, for example, and Francis didn’t even bother to attend Benedict’s interment.

Then there is the recent release (in Italian) of the memoir of Benedict’s faithful assistant, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, with all sorts of revelations feared – about the Roman Curia and the evil deeds of Benedict’s many internal enemies.

Finally, there are the words of that other German Shepherd of virtue and orthodox Catholic values, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, who has spoken straightforwardly about the destruction of the Church. (On Francis’s watch, implied.)

For example, there is this: “On Thursday, October 6, Cardinal Gerhard Müller discussed the ongoing Synod on Synodality and other topics in a roughly 30-minute interview on EWTN’s The World Over with Raymond Arroyo.