Did George Pell Threaten The NSW Parliament?

The case for the affirmative
In the lead up to the vote on therapeutic cloning legislation in the NSW Parliament, George Pell warned Catholic parliamentarians that a vote for the legislation would have consequences they might not like. This was all but universally interpreted as a threat to deny access to the sacraments – the Eucharist, in particular – or even excommunication. This was not an unreasonable inference. Not everyone would remember the confrontation Pell had with the Rainbow Sash movement, but those who do would be forgiven for thinking that Pel was preparing to fry bigger fish.

The case for the negative
As Pell himself has said, he did not explicitly say anything about denying access to the sacraments, much less excommunication, and therefore did not threaten anyone. Warning that consequences would flow from a vote for the legislation is no more than factually correct. For example, other Catholics who oppose the legislation might not vote in future for someone who supports the legislation in parliament. On the face of it supporters of Pell might claim that any threat is in the eye of the beholder, and that he cannot be held responsible for how other people interpret his words.

What’s it about?
Consider the Rainbow Sash issue. For anyone who doesn’t know, a group of gay Catholics in Sydney wanted it to be known that they were Catholic and gay. They wore rainbow sashes to identify themselves and were refused communion when they attended Mass. George Pell’s position was that standards had to be seen to be maintained. Homosexuality is declared by church doctrine to be a sin. Therefore anyone identifying as gay is not in communion with the faithful, and must be made to understand this by denying access to the sacrament of communion. Those who wore the rainbow sash wanted to draw attention to the fact that communion was available to gays who did not publicly acknowledge their sexuality. In their view this was hypocritical and had more to do with the exercise of power than discipleship. It became an issue after a long period of pastoral dialogue with gays, when some Bishops were not afraid to go on record as saying that being gay is like being left handed, and that the conscience of the gay person was the only judge of whether or not s/he was in communion with the faithful. Then, out of the blue, John Paul II declared that one cannot be gay and Catholic. It was at about this time that Pell made a point of saying that the church has never taught the primacy of conscience. This is the critical issue for the vote on therapeutic cloning as well. Pell went on record again with the same assertion, after his statement about the consequences of voting for the legislation. So what it’s about is conscience vs power.

Blind Freddie’s verdict
It should come as no surprise that some, perhaps many, senior clerics don’t like the idea of the primacy of conscience. But lying about it is another matter. And the simple fact is that Pell is lying when he says that the church has never taught the primacy of conscience. As a schoolboy I learned about the primacy of conscience from no less a source than the catechism. Since then there has been a general council of the church that, while not marginalising the clergy, enfranchised the laity in a way that required the proactive exercise of conscience.What is contestable is what the primacy of conscience means in practice. Some bishops have coped with this development in the relationship between clergy and laity. Others haven’t. Pell’s repudiation of gay = left handedness, and his attempt to assert his authority over the NSW parliament are manifestations of the same thing: his refusal to accept that people who do not agree with his views can have a properly formed conscience. He was always going to get away with taking a baseball bat to the Rainbow Sash movement, but throwing his weight around with other people in power was either very brave or very stupid – either way it was very poor leadership. It sets up the confrontation of contrary positions rather than facilitates dialogue between them. In the end whether he threatened the parliament or not will come down to the eye of the beholder. The privileges committee is likely to find itself unaccountably blind.