gossip...

 

Richard McEncroe July 2013 Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations

 

 

When Cardinal George Pell fronted the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations in May this year, the atmosphere was unseasonally heavy.  It was as though the tears of the victims and the anxious sweat of the guilty had combined to infuse the cold Melbourne air with a bitter humidity.

 

To most Australians, and certainly to the victims assembled in the Parliamentary public gallery that day in May, Cardinal Pell needs no introduction.  He has, for more than two decades, been the senior face of the Catholic Church in Australia.    He has power and influence within and outside Australia: Pell told the inquiry: “I do concede that I am one of the better known public faces of the Catholic Church in Australia. I am the senior Catholic bishop in Australia in this sense: I am archbishop of the oldest diocese and I am also a cardinal. A cardinal is an office of the diocese of Rome, so I have a church in Rome. The cardinals are the advisers to the Pope. Our big role is to elect a new Pope when a Pope dies.”

 

Clearly, Cardinal Pell is a player, a power broker, a controller of lives and resources.  He is a decision maker, a policy setter, an influencer of thousands of lives. So his words matter.

 

It is his choice of words, and one word in particular, that struck me harder than any of the appalling truths ventilated during this and other similar inquiries into these horrendous crimes.  It is a word that is as powerful in its reductive capacity as it is innocuous in its appearance.  It invariably serves to trivialise, minimise, and de-legitimise whatever subject matter is attached to. That word is “gossip”.

 

The Concise Oxford defines gossip as 'idle talk, groundless rumour; easy, unconstrained talk or writing about persons or social incidents'.  Cardinal Pell used the word gossip four times during his hour long appearance before the Parliamentary Committee.  Needless to say this tended to jar a little with the Committee and the assembled victims.  Hardly surpising given that by the time the good Cardinal appeared, the Committee had heard months of gruelling, horrific evedince from victims and their families.  The Committee had heard of countless suicides, trauma and untold dysfunction and distress,

all directly attributed to Catholic Clergy - Pell’s boys.

 

Cardinal Pell knew of his appearance before the Committee for several months.  He had ample time to prepare, seek advice and counsel, and, most importantly, to consider his language carefully.  It is safe to assume then that his use of the word gossip is no accident.  And it is how he used it that is really doubly illuminating.

 

Firstly, “gossip” was used to describe inaction following allegations of abuse by Priests.  That’s predictable and not the first time the Church has stated their somewhat curious principle that unless there is some irrefutable forensic evidence it must be gossip.  I say curious because it is totally at odds with how the rest of the world operates.  If a parent were to approach a school Principal and say they were concerned that a teacher might be inappropriately touching their kid, a Principal doesn’t consider that “gossip”.  The teacher is stood down immediately and the matter investigated.  If I walked into a police station and said my child has been raped I don’t imagine the police would consider that gossip. In the real world, the welfare of the kid not the teacher or other perpetrator, is paramount, and risk reduction is front of mind.  Not so for Pell and his mates.

 

More telling even is the second context in which he uses the word gossip.  As part of his explanation for the Church’s systematic failure to identify and remove the rapists from the community, Pell laments that the Church just didn’t know in many cases.  He explained as follows “I have sometimes said that if we had been gossips, which we were not, and we had talked to one another about the problems that were there, we would have realised earlier just how widespread this awful business was”.  So in his mind, members of the clergy talking to other clergy about the fact that they have child rapists in their numbers would be gossiping.  The counter factual of course is that by not talking and dealing with the problem, they were maintaining silence as part of a coordinated criminal conspiracy - and refusing, refusing, to put the welfare of vulnerable children ahead of their own interests.

 

Cardinal Pell just doesn’t get it.  By talking about “gossip” at this Inquiry Pell serves to re-traumatise the victims.  Again their pain is dismissed, minimised, trivialised and de-legitimised.  These victims were not “gossiping”, they were telling someone in authority that they, or their child, or their sister or their brother were being abused, raped, tormented.  Perhaps when the Church grows up they will appreciate that there are alternatives to silence!