Marr also records the unease generated by Pope John Paul II’s announcement in 1996 that Pell would succeed Frank Little as Archbishop of Melbourne. Under the usual process for appointing bishops, the Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops compiles a short list of nominees for each diocese after consultation with senior members of the diocese, clerical and lay. To this day, no one in Melbourne has come forward to admit being officially consulted about Pell: it seems that the process simply did not happen. Little, who had not wanted Pell as his successor, later said that he had ‘to drink from the poisoned cup’.

Cardinal George Pell

Pell’s translation to the archdiocese of Sydney in 2001 – and thereby to a cardinal’s hat and a vote in papal elections – was less of a shock when it happened. By then it was clear how highly he was regarded in Rome, and how readily the Vatican was bending its own rules to install its preferred candidates in major sees around the Catholic world. Pell’s rise as a cultural warrior of the Catholic right should be understood as a distant Antipodean detail in a much bigger picture: the long-reigning John Paul II’s agenda of suppressing liberal reformism within the church, and the related goal of John Paul’s successor Benedict XVI, the restoration of Catholic Christianity as the chief bulwark of Western civilisation. Pell could say of his career what John Howard said of his: the times suited him.

Marr barely sketches this big picture, but to do more would be to write a different essay. His focus, as his subtitle indicates, is on the crisis triggered by the revelations of clerical sexual abuse of children, and on Pell’s occasionally bewildered and frequently belligerent response to that crisis. It is a response that has sometimes exacerbated the suffering of victims and their families, and, in Marr’s eyes, it has also unmasked distortions and contradictions in the Catholic Church’s teaching on human sexuality. His thesis is that men such as Pell cannot admit those contradictions, for if they did they would begin to lose not only the certainties of their faith but their sense of self, too.

It is no small claim, and some readers will conclude that Marr’s argument reveals more of his own preconceptions than it does about the mind of George Pell. Marr’s account of Pell’s actions and utterances during the abuse crisis – successively as priest of the diocese of Ballarat, as seminary rector and auxiliary bishop in Melbourne, and as archbishop first in that city and then in Sydney – is a rigorous sifting and weighing of the public record. The interwoven biographical narrative, however, though always grounded in fact, also relies on arguable but ultimately unprovable psychological interpretation.

The George Pell who emerges from that narrative is a man who early in life learned to be both resolute in seeking the things he wanted and defensive in securing them. His mother was devoutly Catholic, but his Protestant father, a Ballarat publican, was hostile to his son’s choice of vocation. And Pell grew up at a time when being Catholic in Australia, especially in Victoria, meant choosing whether to align oneself with Bob Santamaria and his Movement’s crusade against communism. Pell became a disciple and ally of Santamaria, and their association deepened as the latter’s attentions were increasingly absorbed by dissension within the church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The moral teaching enshrined in papal pronouncements such as Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical against contraception, provoked many Catholics to take a more critical stance towards church authority, especially in sexual matters. For conservatives such as Pell and Santamaria, however, the social upheavals of the 1960s reinforced their sense of the church as the last bastion in a struggle against modernity. Adherence to the teaching of the encyclical became for them a kind of litmus test of loyalty to the church, which had constantly to be defended against enemies without and within.

The contradiction in that paranoia-tinged view of the world has been laid bare by the sexual-abuse crisis. Those who have brought the church into disrepute have not been liberal theologians urging a rethinking of the church’s strictures on sexual morality, but priests and teachers who publicly upheld Catholic teaching even as they were routinely abusing children in their care. The bishops and superiors of religious institutes who sought to protect the church’s reputation by concealing perpetrators and attacking the credibility of victims only diminished that reputation further, and their faltering attempts to rectify the mess they made have ultimately led to the royal commission now under way in this country, and to similar public inquiries elsewhere.

Marr’s essay hinges on Pell’s incomprehension of the plight in which the church finds itself, an incomprehension evident in the cardinal’s aggressive, resentful behaviour during a media conference called in response to then prime minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of the royal commission. Pell was, as Marr says, by turns weary and defiant. Even though the commission will not solely inquire into Catholic institutions, he demanded that the church ‘not be scapegoated’. To the wider world his message, intended or not, was that the church had become the victim.

That message was compounded by Pell’s evidence before the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into sexual abuse, in which he appeared, not for the first time, incapable of showing any real empathy for victims and their families. Marr piles case upon case of Pell’s empathic failures, and offers a diagnosis: the cardinal’s emotional distance and rigidities, he argues, stem from his rejection of his own sexuality; celibacy, it seems, is to blame. Well, David Marr would say that, Pell’s admirers might reply. Certainly, the essay’s concluding psychological indictment of its subject cannot be said to rest on anything resembling clinical proof. But it is a conclusion that will be seized upon as obvious to those disposed to think as Marr does, and indignantly rejected by those who cling to Pell’s brand of fortress Catholicism. Those in the middle ground will struggle to be heard over the crossfire.

The Prince will start arguments, not resolve them, but that is in the nature of essays such as this. And whether or not Marr’s verdict on Pell is fair, his account of the church’s lamentable handling of the abuse crisis undoubtedly is. Pell himself remains an enigma, like the Machiavellian ruler alluded to in Marr’s title.