Too much has been written in recent weeks about the sad affair of Jason Arday, the University of Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor. Arday was accused of being a plagiarist, fabulist, and fabricator of data. Having resigned his professorship he then died shortly afterwards.

The whole episode has been febrile, with Arday’s critics denouncing his appointment as a scandal. In turn, Arday’s defenders have accused the critics of racism and harassment.

This essay does not directly revisit these controversial subjects. Others have debated amply what the episode says about diversity (DEI) policies and discrimination, academic freedom, and the limits of free speech. My concern here is more fundamental: to explore what Arday’s rise and fall tell us about how universities make and legitimate intellectual judgments.

The contemporary University seems to me to be increasingly reluctant to acknowledge that it must make such judgments. Its core business depends on discriminating about things all the time: about quality of evidence, plausibility of interpretations, significance of research, and ultimately who deserves admission, appointment, promotion, or authority within the ivory tower.

One of the things that has got Cambridge into such trouble is a suspicion that it makes judgments of merit that it is not willing to explicitly acknowledge still less to defend. The emphasis is all on process: on the procedure followed to reach the decision rather than how good is the decision made.

If universities are to recover their intellectual authority, they need not better substitutes for judgment but faculty who are more capable of exercising it and of discriminating intelligently between many competing claims.

The retreat from judgment

Process makes the world go round. We depend on it precisely because we cannot always rely on the wisdom, impartiality, or common sense of everyone whose path crosses our own. My argument starts with the observation that processes are mechanisms for constraining judgment within limits — in judicial review, legal limits. But process is no substitute for judgment on the merits.

This is not an argument to abandon constraints. Unconstrained judgment in a university setting is almost always vulnerable to abuse via patronage, prejudice, or the imposition of ideological tests. It lacks a pristine record, in academia as elsewhere.

Problems nevertheless arise when we mistake a means by which a judgment can be scrutinised for a basis on which that judgment deserves to be trusted. Judicial review, the legal procedure whereby judges look for a failure in the manner of deciding, rather than ask themselves whether they agree with the decision taken, may be the inspiration for how universities approach this.

Modern institutions are used to complying with a legal regime that distinguishes sharply between a decision’s merit and whether or not it has been properly made. Only in rare cases is a court prepared to label a decision perverse will it substitute its own judgment of the merits for that of the initial decision-maker.

Procedure leaves an auditable trail. We can use that to establish if rules were followed, conflicts declared, and criteria considered. Universities have found that establishing this procedural accountability is much easier than evaluating a decision’s actual quality. They have also discovered that it is far safer institutionally because demonstrable acts of compliance protect against legal challenge.

The same logic operates in intellectual life. To take an academic example: the humble footnote. It began as a device for making an author’s claims answerable to evidence. Yet somewhere along the way producing reams of references became a badge of scholarship itself.

Footnotes have not become bad or meaningless as a result of this transformation. They still impose a useful discipline on those of us who use them. But a thousand meticulous references tell us nothing about whether the argument they support is brilliant, tendentious, trivial, or misguided.

The impressiveness of the apparatus demonstrates command of scholarly procedure but gives no guarantees about command of subject.

Checking the boxes

Universities today are awash with similar institutional tools. We academics must contend with peer review, citation metrics, research assessments, appointment criteria, promotion frameworks, ethics procedures, and assessment rubrics. Most of these things exist for good reasons and all in different ways have attempted to make judgments consistent and transparent.

Yet none of them is a remotely effective proxy for sound judgment. A rubric can tell an assessor what to look for. It cannot tell us whether the assessor recognises it when it appears. Citation counts show scholarship that is noticed not why it has been noticed (this need not be because the work cited is a significant original contribution to knowledge). Appointment criteria give committees a shopping list. The difficult business begins when several candidates offer different combinations of what is on it.

The issue confronting academics has always been one of intellectual discrimination. A scholarly community must be able to distinguish the good from the bad. If no procedures can relieve us of the need to decide between competing claims, we need to be able to say what makes particular judgments about intellectual quality defensible.

Evidence can be part of the answer — but facts do not interpret themselves. Many interpretations can fit a given set of facts. Good judgment asks not only what evidence exists? but also how much should this particular piece of evidence count? It assesses whether a given interpretation explains evidence better than realistic alternatives. Those who exercise it need a sense of proportion and good intellectual habits to do this.

Seen in these terms, the Arday affair looks rather different from how it is usually presented. Controversy over Arday’s appointment revolves around judgment about ends: what was his appointment intended to achieve — and how were competing considerations of scholarly distinction, institutional representation, pedagogy and diversity to be balanced?

The allegations against Arday, by contrast, involve judgment about significance. Even where specific claims can be established empirically, the larger conclusions they warrant still need to be decided upon. Even establishing the truth of an allegation still requires a judgment about proportion. Failure may be real without being defining. Misconduct can be worth disciplining without destroying a career in the process.

The fried egg and the mountain

The harder problem about judgment is this: there is no objective test for determining where legitimate differences of interpretation end and errors of judgment begin. How do we recognise a perverse intellectual (as opposed to legal) decision?

The Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans once borrowed an attractively simple analogy from E.H. Carr to frame the problem. Evans envisaged a group of painters stationed at different points around a mountain. Each painter painted the mountain differently — yet all were constrained in their depictions by the fact that they were painting the same mountain.

Evans argued that we can accept a wide variety of legitimate representations without also having to accept reality as infinitely subjective and experiential.

In Evans’s view, if one painter had depicted not a mountain but a fried egg or a railway engine we would be entitled to say that their representation is wrong. The analogy appeals because it appears to reconcile two apparently incompatible propositions about judgment (interpretation is dependent on the observer’s position and reality constrains interpretation).

Yet Evans’s analogy cannot always pinpoint where legitimate interpretation ends and error begins. We may agree about the evidence’s authenticity — and even the accuracy of a particular claim about it — yet still disagree profoundly about that claim’s significance.

Disagreements of this nature happen all the time with historical interpretation (differing perspectives on the German Reformation or the French Revolution are good examples). But they are still more common, and more problematic, when they concern (to sustain Evans’s analogy) not what the painter has done but what we understand them to have been trying to do.

A fried egg is obviously a false representation of a mountain if the object is to reproduce its physical appearance. But if the painter claims to be representing not this but the mountain’s conceptual essence? A yolk for a summit, a white for the surrounding plain. Is that not a picture that captures just the kind of relationship which a conventional landscape obscures?

Novelty and its discontents

Part of my reason for writing is my observation that the need for good judgment has, if anything, grown as universities have become less comfortable exercising it. The contemporary academy places an extraordinary premium on the original. To command attention today’s scholars must be more than just accurate, learned, and useful: we must be novel — and, of course, novelty is itself an unusually difficult quality to judge.

Is it enough simply to discover new information? The assessment criteria of most funding bodies in Australia as well as Britain would say no. What is needed is a broader contribution to a method, a conceptual framework, or some other means by which the information is understood.

We might note that this novelty premium is itself historically contingent. In the period of European History I study (early modernity), imitation of other authors was a mark of intellectual accomplishment rather than its opposite. Learned types demonstrated their erudition through their very familiarity with and redeployment of others’ words and ideas.

Modern academic culture has travelled very much in the opposite direction. It rewards people for producing — to extend Evans’s metaphor — new styles of representing the mountain. Yet this very premium on innovation exacerbates the underlying judgment problem because originality creates a claim to attention without guaranteeing added value.

Recurrent controversies surrounding awards such as art’s Turner Prize — too much originality, not enough mastery of craft — illustrate this difficulty. The Arday controversy arguably does too: an appointment widely celebrated as trailblazing was certainly novel — and its symbolic significance was plainly part of its public meaning. Yet nothing in Cambridge’s decision to make Arday a professor settled the question of whether Arday really deserved his position.

The difficulty lies not in working out whether something is new. It lies in judging if the invention is valuable or simply a departure from the current norm.

Who guards the guards themselves?

Much of the wider argument over Arday has revolved around the specific disagreement just described. But who is to be the umpire who decides which side is right? Ultimately, the University — unless the matter is taken out of its hands — has no choice but to let those people on whom it has conferred authority judge it (these are usually, but not always, internally or externally appointed academics). What I first presented as a problem of judgment is therefore, at length, a question about judges. The institutional reckoning over Arday currently in progress underlines this point rather neatly.

Not only Cambridge but also Durham and Glasgow universities are now revisiting their own previous decisions to appoint Arday. Liverpool John Moores University has also faced demands to reexamine his doctoral thesis. Reviews will presumably recommend changes to process and procedure. Some suggestions may well be sensible. But procedures can only ever be as good as the judgments of those who devise and apply them.

There is no escape from the circularity. Recognising who is most suitable to judge — at first instance and later, if the decision of the initial judges is challenged outside the legal system — when challenged is itself an exercise in judgment. No further procedure can resolve that difficulty. Judgment is cultivated through disciplinary formation, experience, criticism, and disagreement. And no institution can guarantee its own survival or prevent its own slide into conformity, prejudice, or exclusion without the possibility of continued criticism and disagreement to keep that slide in check.

Another way of putting the issue is this: universities are gatekeeping institutions. They cannot read their distinctive intellectual success straightforwardly from a balance sheet or a bottom line. Their reputation depends above all else on whether experts and the public trust them to distinguish between good and bad scholarship (and pedagogy) when they see it. That means recognising genuine expertise and discerning who should be admitted to those positions from which they will judge others in turn.

The quality of the gatekeepers is therefore central, not incidental, to the academy’s ongoing authority. Robust procedures remain essential, not because such procedures can themselves substitute for judgment but because they help ensure that those who do judge remain answerable for their exercise.

Arday’s career matters, then, not simply because some universities have judged badly — it is that public confidence in the quality of those who judge has been badly shaken and there is no quick and easy way of winning it back.

First published on ABC Religion & Ethics, 1 September 2026.

In the Vatican’s New Synod Hall, Pope Leo XIV appeared last week alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah. The two men probably do not agree on many things, but this time they spoke in concert about the urgent threat AI now poses to humanity. But Leo’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is not simply a warning about the coming of the machines. It attempts to insert Catholic intellectual traditions into the emerging debate over our age’s most contested technology.

The encyclical is, above all, about authority: Who gets to define the human?

A civilisation that measures everything, and that values only what can be measured, will eventually lose the capacity to recognise the human, the divine and the ineffable, the pope contends. He fears that moral universalism cannot easily survive technocracy — but it needs to if human dignity, conscience and compassion are to flourish yet.

Magnifica Humanitas raises the institutional stakes. It commits the Catholic Church formally and publicly to a set of positions about artificial intelligence (AI) that can now be held up, examined and weighed against the institution that proclaimed them.

The church wants a seat at the table, for a papal encyclical is a geopolitical act as much as it is a theological document. But, in this case, it is also a personal statement that tells us about the pope himself as much as it is about its purported subject: who he thinks he is, how he wants his papacy to be seen, and whom he wants to influence.

Babel or Jerusalem?

What, then, does Leo say in Magnifica Humanitas? The name of the encyclical evokes Mary’s song of praise (Luke 1:46–55) and does so in a way that is quietly subversive. A text about who controls God-like technologies echoes a prayer in which the Lord casts the mighty from their thrones and sends the rich away empty.

The pope’s chief argument in Magnifica Humanitas is that humanity needs a new framework for approaching AI’s ethical dimensions. We should be asking how we govern it and make it accountable, how we guarantee the dignity of work in the face of its advance, and how we preserve truth and democracy, prevent warfare and critique what Silicon Valley calls “transhumanism”.

As humans, Leo insists, our choice is not whether we embrace technology — that’s a done deal. It is how we do so: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes , “Who guards the guards themselves”? Regulation of AI is currently in the hands of the few. Should it be permitted to remain there or must we find a way to ensure that it is organised according to subsidiary principles that benefit everyone?

Leo offers up a pair of biblical models to help us discern the choices. His first model is Babel — a civilisation that builds for power and uniformity, but which reduces everything, including persons, to data and performance. Its citizens mistake efficiency for wisdom. Leo’s second model is Jerusalem under Nehemiah — a city rebuilt not by a single visionary but by patient, communitarian collaboration. As he writes:

In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.

Every human being is made in God’s image. This proves a critical point of departure for thinking about what machines can and cannot do for us. Because the dignity we each possess is intrinsic, no algorithm can measure, rank or revoke it. AI systems that sort and exclude us without possibility of appeal are not only unfair but also commit a category error.

He insists that AI cannot be considered morally neutral. In any case, “a more moral AI” would still be insufficient if that morality lacked genuine democratic participation in the construction of its frameworks. An “ecology of communication” needs to be established so that truth is treated as a common good rather than a resource to be weaponised. Likewise, autonomous weapons systems must not be allowed because the decision to use lethal force “cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes”. And transhumanism — the idea that human limitation is a defect to be engineered away — is not merely misguided but a denial of the very humanity it claims to perfect.

In short, a civilisation that optimises away its imponderables will find, too late, that it has also surrendered its ability to thrive.

The encyclical’s historical imagination

It is no accident that Leo signed his text on 15 May, the 135th anniversary of the Leo XIII’s celebrated encyclical Rerum Novarum, which is Catholic Social Teaching’s foundational document. Leo has already sought, through the selection of his name, to link himself to that earlier pope who intervened in the face of an Industrial Revolution that had reduced workers to the status of units of capital and production. The analogy is imperfect. Industrial capitalism mechanised labour, but AI may yet mechanise elements of cognition itself.

Everything that follows in Magnifica Humanitas flows from that self-identification. Leo XIII was arguably the most consequential pope of the modern era — the man who created “the pope” in his present incarnation as a voice of conscience for humanity. By casting himself as Leo XIII’s direct successor, Leo XIV signals both that he believes the world to be entering an equivalent moment of transformation and that he is equal to the task of guiding the church through it.

What Magnifica Humanitas omits may nevertheless be as interesting as what it includes. Its historical imagination, for instance, is surprisingly limited. Textual references cluster in just two periods: biblical antiquity and the years since Rerum Novarum. In the account of Magnifica Humanitas, essentially nothing happened between Nehemiah in the fifth century BC and the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth. Augustine garners just four references in the text and Aquinas two — placing him just above Hannah Arendt and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which receive one each.

It might be conceded that Leo’s encyclical has an essentially Thomist framework, but the absence of Duns Scotus or other key figures in the scholastic tradition that generated much of the speculative theology which it deploys is striking.

The Babel-Jerusalem duality also discreetly glosses over the fact that the Catholic Church itself has been one of history’s most enthusiastic Babel-builders when its interests have been at stake. After all, until 1966 it maintained a list of books whose circulation it considered too threatening to permit.

Magnifica Humanitas does not address the church’s reaction to the Printing Revolution of the sixteenth century or to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth. Perhaps this is understandable — though one wonders what Galileo’s ghost would make of it all — yet both “revolutions” precipitated precisely the sort of soul-searching Leo now reserves for AI.

We might observe that the Catholic Church has often engaged with new technologies in a consistent sequence: first resistance; then attempted control; followed by strategic adoption; and finally theological integration. Leo’s text arguably moves that sequence for AI closer to its endpoint. But it does not necessarily follow that his interlocutors in Silicon Valley or secular government will accept an agenda on his terms.

Amen to the algorithm

Perhaps the most intriguing question about Magnifica Humanitas is one about audience: For whom is this encyclical written?

Yes, the pope has written it for the Catholic faithful, as is the case with all encyclicals, but this time he clearly has an eye on non-Catholics too — specifically, those non-Catholics who form Silicon Valley’s core of innovators and safety researchers, as well as those who populate the global governing class’s regulatory caste.

Leo’s choice of references seems almost tailored to speak to the progressive sensibilities of these groups. Not only does he refer to The Lord of the Rings — the tech geek’s Old Testament, if you will — but he notably and carefully acknowledges the Catholic Church’s slowness in condemning slavery, an original wickedness that reduced persons to “manageable” data.

Even the staging of last week’s event showed Leo’s awareness of appropriate presentation. Two women — theologian Anna Rowlands and theological ethicist Léocadie Lushombo, the latter a person of colour from the Global South — sat alongside Cardinal Víctor Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Michael Czerny, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. This was not merely the stale, pale, male Vatican of old.

Leo knows his audience, but will they listen to him? The history of papal social teaching may not seem encouraging on this point, for it is largely one of admirable statements and selective engagement. Rerum Novarum did not stop the exploitation of labour. More recently, Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ did nothing to slow down the carbon economy.

And yet there is hope for the pope. There is a suggestion being put about that in the encyclical Leo is specifically rebutting Peter Thiel, the conservative tech billionaire who reportedly told Vice-President JD Vance to ignore the pontiff on AI ethics. Thiel has spoken of mortality as an injustice to be overcome rather than a condition to be sanctified, and about “transhumanism” in precisely the terms that Leo’s encyclical confronts.

At a broader level, the “Minerva Dialogues” — annual closed-door conversations between Silicon Valley and the Vatican — have for ten years now attracted important non-Catholic figures who take a different view to Thiel. Such tech titans recognise that Christianity provides something their start-ups alone cannot: a framework for discussing what is humanly desirable, not simply what is technically possible.

It seems AI is already biased in favour of Catholic moral reasoning. Perhaps that is why Chris Olah, an atheist, consulted Catholic priests and theologians when drafting his model’s ethical constitution — its so-called “soul doc”. Olah and others may well have to listen to Pope Leo even more attentively in the future, because AI is haemorrhaging public trust and its prophets in Silicon Valley are already being compared to an unaccountable priesthood.

If so, Magnifica Humanitas could prove to be techno-capitalism’s baptismal moment.

Postscript: The AI Inquisition

It was perhaps inevitable that self-appointed AI investigators are now claiming that significant portions of Magnifica Humanitas were generated by artificial intelligence. Linch Zhang and Daniel Filan have analysed its word frequencies, punctuation usage, sentence rhythms and rhetorical structure. According to Zhang, Magnifica Humanitas differs notably from previous encyclicals in how it performs under AI detector scrutiny. While some of its paragraphs appear to be wholly human in construction, others are flagged as entirely artificial — written by Claude, Zhang thinks.

On one level, these claims are frivolous. At another, they make Magnifica Humanitas a live demonstration of its own thesis. Pope Leo warned that we are entering a world in which we can no longer distinguish authentic human expression from its synthetic imitation. And here we are, unable to verify his very words. The irony is heaven sent.

The encyclical’s collaborative nature may, in fact, exonerate Pope Leo himself from accusations of wrongdoing. Magnifica Humanitas, like most such documents, is a team effort, with Leo likely exercising overall oversight. He stands at greater risk of criticism not because some subordinates “cut corners” by using Claude, but if it comes to be thought that he endorsed any use of a chatbot to substitute the labour of his team of human ghostwriters. Automating away Catholic theologians is precisely the kind of thing his own encyclical warns against.

And yet in a final twist, someone has since fed the encyclical back into Claude AI. The chatbot came up with a lengthy list of theological objections and philosophical errors in the text which it thought might have raise eyebrows at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Not even the pope expects the AI Inquisition, apparently.

First published on ABC Religion & Ethics, 1 June 2026.

Pope Leo XIV is in the news, once again, following his fresh criticism of the Trump administration’s war in Iran. In a rebuke to the president’s threat that a “whole civilisation will die” if Iran fails to acquiesce to US demands, the pope responded:

Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable. There are certainly issues here of international law, but even more than that, it is a moral question for the good of the [world’s] people.

A thinly veiled critique delivered by social media a few days later, Pope Leo wrote:

God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.

A further, more startling story was disclosed around the same time. In January, the Pentagon had summoned the papal nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, for a dressing down about Leo’s speech to the Vatican diplomatic corps. The pope had used that speech to argue that “a zeal for war is spreading” and that “the principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined”.

The Trump administration seemingly views Pope Leo’s words as an attack on them. The Avignon papacy — a low point in the history of the Catholic Church, when French kings bent popes to their will — was alleged mentioned during the “bitter lecture” directed at Cardinal Pierre. Vatican officials have stated that the “narrative offered by some media outlets about this meeting is completely untrue”, and Cardinal Pierre’s meeting with the Pentagon “was part of the Papal Representative’s regular mission and provided the opportunity for an exchange of views on matters of mutual interest”.

The story has gained traction nevertheless — in part because, whatever the Pentagon did or did not say, no one now doubts the antipathy between pope and president. Just yesterday, Trump came out with a typically graceless attack on Leo. “I’m not a big fan”, he told reporters. The pope is “weak” and “terrible for foreign policy”, he wrote on Truth Social.

Neither side can fully control how their deteriorating relationship is represented — yet the Pentagon’s alleged choice of historical analogy was, in its way, as revealing as Trump’s coarse words. It fundamentally misreads where papal power actually resides, and shows an administration that understands hard power very well but soft power hardly at all.

The Avignon papacy was an episode of institutional capture. French kings controlled who popes were, where papal revenues flowed and even the physical circumstances in which popes lived. Trump does not control those things and does not want to. What he wants — and what Leo is refusing to give — is something less tangible: moral legitimacy. That is a very different kind of struggle, and it has a much better historical parallel.

The best and worst of times

The cautionary tale that best illustrates where we actually are with Leo and Trump lies not in the fourteenth century but in the early nineteenth when Pius VII was pope and Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor.

Others have made Trump-Napoleon comparisons before: Jan-Werner Müller, for instance, asked last year whether “Caesarism — a term invented in the nineteenth century to describe Napoleon’s particular form of rule — [is] a good analogy for understanding Donald Trump?” The Trump-Leo, Napoleon-Pius VII comparison is instructive, nevertheless.

When Napoleon confronted Pius, he had already dragged his predecessor to France where Pius VI died in captivity. “One can die anywhere”, a pitiless French general had told the ailing, octogenarian pontiff, who had asked to be left alone to die in his bed. The cardinals had been forced to convene in Venice, not Rome, to elect Pius VI’s successor in 1800. The new pope took back his city, but only because the Jacobin republic installed there had proved even more fantastically unpopular than papal rule.

Napoleon made the Pius VII sign a largely unfavourable concordat that effectively transferred control over the French church to the state. Notoriously, he then summoned Pius to Paris where he was made to preside over Napoleon’s imperial coronation.

At the climactic moment, Napoleon snatched the crown from the pontiff’s hands, placing it on his own head. Pius had been used — and had been seen to be used. Within five years, he would be under house arrest at Fontainebleau, a second consecutive papal prisoner of the man he anointed.

Trump is not planning to march on Rome, or to capture Leo. Yet the structural logic of his conflict with Leo is remarkably similar to this earlier one. Like Pius, Leo commands immense symbolic capital but negligible hard power. Like Pius, he leads an institution that needs the goodwill of great powers — and yet must periodically defy them to maintain its credibility. And like Pius, he faces a “strong man” leader who cannot afford to be seen to be attacking the papal office directly, even as he clearly resents its occupant.

Trump, though a Protestant, is, by multiple accounts, genuinely impressed by papal prestige. And, like Napoleon — who relied on the church to reconcile conservative France to his rule after the upheavals of revolution — he needs American Catholics to see their faith and his politics as somehow being in harmony. They are a key group within his coalition.

Trump also understands how legitimacy is partly theatre. Leo’s decision to spend 4 July on Lampedusa rather than in the United States will not have been lost on the president. It is, in many ways, a magnificent, Napoleonic gesture of contempt — and one that may have raised the stakes beyond a level at which popes should feel comfortable to play.

Full of sound and fury

Pope Leo XIV looks, right now, like the winner of his encounter with Trump. Polite opinion across the West is very much on his side. Bernie Sanders endorsed Leo’s Easter message. Cory Booker praised his “moral clarity”. The Atlantic, The Nationand the Daily Beast have all treated him as a heroic figure for speaking truth to power. And yet the lessons of Pius VII’s confrontation with Napoleon ought not to be comfortable for either side in this neo-imperial controversy.

For Trump, the Napoleonic precedent is simply ruinous: the emperor’s imprisonment of Pius rallied Catholic Europe against him at precisely the moment he could least afford it and turned a cautious and partly compliant pope into a martyr. Trump may calculate that he can discredit Leo by painting him as a bleeding-heart critic of American power. He may even be right about the diagnosis. But the treatment won’t work. A pope who is visibly bullied becomes impossible to defeat in the court of public opinion. People respond to the papal office emotionally and instinctively, in ways that cut across political allegiance.

For Leo, however, the warnings begin with a tactical problem of his own making. Having now criticised Trump directly, he has broken a taboo — and taboos, once broken, lose their power. Each subsequent intervention will carry diminishing force. The pope is surely asking himself: was this the moment to sound that particular trumpet? Can he escalate if a graver crisis demands an even clearer moral verdict in the months ahead?

A deeper problem afflicts Leo, too — one that concerns not tactics but moral consistency. Iran is not a neutral party in this conflict, and it is certainly not a sympathetic one. It is a theocracy that executes its own citizens for demanding basic rights, and which funds and arms proxy forces responsible for thousands of civilian deaths across the Middle East. Iran has publicly committed itself to the elimination of Israel. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz has inflicted potentially catastrophic damage on the global economy.

Leo has been notably (one might say, conspicuously) quieter on these matters than he has been on Trump’s rhetoric. The Babylon Bee, the conservative Christian satire site, called him out on this with characteristic bluntness: “Pope Condemns Allied Forces For Not Just Talking It Out With Nazis”. The Bee’s statement is a reductio ad absurdum, but it has real bite: for many consider strict and symmetrical pacifism — the position that war is always wrong and that dialogue is always possible — to be dangerously naïve.

Does the pope really think that the Iran situation can be solved through talks? If so, on what basis? Is he willing to spell out his reasoning in detail that others can critique? His predecessor, Pope Francis, was easily dismissed by his critics because he so rarely did this or represented opposing arguments with the kind of generosity that open debate demands.

As my friend Sam Rubinstein recently noted on social media, it is considerably easier to maintain Leo’s point of view from a position of complete powerlessness than from one of executive responsibility: “I wonder if this sort of strict and principled pacifism would be the position of the Catholic Church if it had any worldly power? Ah well, I suppose there’s no way of knowing.”

The high ground is easiest to reach for when you have no other ground to defend. To govern is to be forced to choose. And the Catholic Church, across its long history, has hardly been unwilling to choose force when doing so suited its institutional purposes — just ask those whom it has branded as “heretics”.

The unbearable lightness of being pontiff

Pope Leo XIV is an intelligent man, and there are signs that he understands the risks of the world he is moving into. The Catholic Church did not emerge from the Napoleonic era unscathed — another factor that ought to inform his thinking. It lost property, treasure and institutional dignity. The trauma of those long revolutionary years cast a dark shadow, making the papacy brittle and defensive at precisely the moments it needed to be supple (for instance, during the revolutions of 1848 and the Risorgimento).

There is no guarantee of coming through any better this time. Leo’s rebuke of Trump’s civilisation-ending rhetoric was not wrong; it was, arguably, the minimum the papal office demanded. But to speak carefully in one direction is still to speak in one direction. Caution in tone is not the same thing as wisdom in strategy.

Trump himself, whatever his many faults, pulled back from the brink, delaying military action and entering negotiations.

Leo might reflect on whether the most durable contribution he can make is to position himself as the conscience of one political tribe, or whether he might aspire to a harder and more valuable role: that of the genuinely impartial voice, trusted by all sides and therefore capable of being heard by them.

History, it should be said, does not offer many encouraging precedents for a pope playing that impartial role. Most popes who have tried to speak across the battle lines of their era have flunked the test, or been ignored, or both. Any pope who tells all parties what they do not want to hear is hardly likely to do better.

For Leo, the most hopeful figure in the papal tradition may, in fact, be the man whose name he chose to take. Leo XIII did manage to make the great powers of his day listen to him — but he did so not by positioning himself above their concerns. Rather, he engaged with them seriously, acknowledging real grievances on all sides and representing even the anticlerical and liberal traditions with a generosity that surprised their adherents.

That was a far harder thing to do than issuing beautiful condemnations. It is also a better model than Pius VII’s bruising — and, ultimately, deforming — confrontation with hegemonic power.

First published on ABC Religion & Ethics, 13 April 2026.

Pope Francis (17 December 1936 – 21 April 2025), that unexpected but much anticipated first pope from the Global South, was a new kind of pontiff. He was an anti-pontiff. An Argentinian from humble origins — his father was an Italian immigrant accountant — he set store by the power of simple gestures, surrounding himself with children, reaching out to the sick and destitute, and giving up his grand papal apartments in favour of a simple life in the Vatican’s Domus Sanctae Marthae guest house.

Few who saw them will have forgotten the various episodes in his life that went viral: the little boy whom Francis let sit in his papal chair; the time he approached a man disfigured with neurofibromatosis to embrace and kiss him; his lonely walk through St Peter’s Square during the COVID-19 pandemic to pray for the world.

Through such gestures Francis won himself a global fanbase that extended far beyond practising Catholics. To the world’s media he was a “people’s pope”, the very model of a modern man of faith who seemed capable of transcending politics, healing division and leading by example in ways that secular figures could not.

Care for our common home

Francis was the first ever Jesuit pope, but he devoted his papacy not to his Society but to the thirteenth-century mystic Francis of Assisi.

Saint Francis had already inspired countless as an uncomplicated man devoted to God, the poor and to nature. He famously appeared naked before his local bishop in an effort to persuade him of his sincere desire to live in “holy poverty”. He talked to the birds in the trees and urged them to sing God’s praises.

Likewise, Pope Francis made simplicity and humility his trademarks. He presented himself as a sort of “anti-pope” who championed the downtrodden and who rejected pomp and flummery. He preached a powerful message of tolerance — for example, “Who am I to judge?” was his celebrated response to a question about gay Catholics in 2013. He also hinted at major shifts in the Vatican’s position on sexual ethics, abortion and women’s ordination. Indeed, his 2016 letter Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Loving”) and his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (“We are All Brothers”) set out a powerful philosophical argument for such shifts.

In the end, however, Francis was unable to deliver very much. The Catholic Church’s official teaching has remained much as it was at the start of his pontificate, with only minor concessions to women’s place in the Church’s formal life. The much-hyped Synod on Synodality (2021–2024) — perhaps intended to test the Church’s temperature and willingness to reform — has little to show for it. Part of the problem was that Francis was acutely aware of the need to generate consensus. As pope, he could lead but he had to be sure others would follow.

So too it has been in other areas of policy close to Francis’s heart. His encyclical letter Laudato Si’ (“Praise be to you”, a title taken from Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Sun), and its follow up Laudate Deum (2023), embraced a deeply ecological outlook. They exhorted humanity to “care for our common home”. Yet governments and citizens alike have moved on, looking increasingly to mitigate climate change not to prevent it. Sadly, Francis never got around to saying much about this.

The pope and his critics

Francis’s failures to act, or to keep pace with the global conversation, sometimes played into the hands of his conservative critics. He was less a people’s pontiff, they said, than a priestly incarnation of that fairy-tale emperor whose “new clothes” turned out to be no clothes at all.

Such critics — and Australia’s Cardinal George Pell ranked first among them — pointed to the increasingly chaotic and corrupt nature of the Vatican under Francis’s watch, to his own allegedly controlling tendencies, and to his support for key lieutenants who put people’s backs up or were just generally incompetent.

One such lieutenant, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, was accused of embezzlement, abuse of office and subornation. Becciu’s spectacular fall in 2020was a monumental scandal that embarrassed the Vatican. The repercussions are still being felt to this day, in part because the justice meted out never quite shrugged off the appearance of a show trial. Financier Raffaele Mincione, moreover, tried to sue the Vatican in London’s High Court for what he alleged to be its unfair treatment of him in the affair.

The harassment of priests and bishops who wished to celebrate the old Tridentine Rite Latin Mass, which was previously encouraged by Pope Benedict XVI, also looked vindictive and quickly became another source of angst and tension. Francis was clearly annoyed, even angered, by subordinates who critiqued him too strongly on this matter. His frustration occasionally burst out into pejorative language that was unworthy of a pope. “There’s already too much faggotry around”, he is alleged to have said about the Church’s propensity to attract “liturgy queens” — a statement that stands in marked contrast to his earlier willingness to suspend judgement about homosexuality.

The pope’s difficult cases

More troubling, for the pope, was the case of the Marko Rupnik, a Jesuit priest accused of abusing multiple women. Francis stood accused of having protected Rupnik for a long time, which further tarnished him in the eyes of his detractors. At what cost to Rupnik’s victims and to the Church’s reputation? Much like the case of Becciu, the pope either failed to get a grip on what was happening beneath his nose or, far worse, was somehow complicit in the concealment.

The cases of Becciu and Rupnik represented two of the most explosive scandals of Francis’s twelve-year pontificate — but there were others. The Vatican had known of accusations against Theodore McCarrick, Cardinal Archbishop of Washington DC, for decades before Francis’s election and yet had decided not to investigate him. However, the case exploded on Francis’s watch. Francis denied knowledge of the allegations against McCarrick and subsequently defrocked him, ordered an investigation into the scandal and made its findings public.

Francis also attracted criticism for his responses to credible allegations of abuse and cover up involving the Argentinian bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, and the Chilean priest Fernando Karadima and bishop Juan Barros. In his defence, the pope faced a very difficult situation when dealing with such cases. He knew that he could not always act on accusations, let alone rumours. He generally strived to show empathy and compassion for abuse victims, to show that he understood and accepted their trauma.

Francis also exhibited his trademark humility throughout his pontificate. “All I am trying to do is advance the Gospel”, he once said. “But imperfectly, because sometimes I make mistakes.” This change of tone was particularly important in the context of clerical sexual abuse. Such remarks, and the sentiment they contained, often allowed Francis to win the benefit of the doubt from international media. They were the opposite of the bombastic claims to infallibility made by his nineteenth-century predecessors.

But the relatively easy ride that Francis got from the media annoyed many conservatives. They argued (not without basis) that Pope Benedict XVI had not received the same treatment — indeed, that he had often been unfairly held personally responsible for everything that happened between 2005 and 2013.

For his part, Francis only compounded the issue by sometimes failing to think through the implications of his willingness to show intent through symbolic action. One example of this occurred when he went to Canada to apologise for the Catholic Church’s role in abusing indigenous children in residential schools. Francis’s intention was good but the narrative of genocide of native children, for which he apologised, was always open to reasonable doubt.

The pope as a geopolitical actor

In his final years, Francis had to contend with a deteriorating geopolitical situation. Here too he lived his mission to speak up for the poor, weak and vulnerable. His stridency as a critic of Israel was not, however, matched by a similar lack of equivocation towards Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Many Catholics noticed.

Francis’s criticisms of Israel focused on a justified humanitarian concern for Gaza’s civilian population after Hamas’s 7 October 2024 terror attack against ordinary Israelis. An excerpt from his recent memoir drew attention to the opinion of some international law experts that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide”. In January 2025 he went still further, calling the situation:

very serious and shameful … We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians … We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.

Though Pope Francis was visibly and vocally concerned for the fate of those hostages taken by Hamas, Israel’s Foreign Ministry admonished him repeatedly for such one-sided remarks. They felt Francis never seemed to have engaged with the Israeli government’s claims that it has taken reasonable efforts to avoid civilian causalities, to say nothing of the role played by the reckless indifference of Hamas in the ongoing atrocities.

Even so, it is notable that Francis’s final Urbi et Orbi message on Easter Sunday would call for an end to this conflict:

I would like us to renew our hope that peace is possible! From the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, where this year Easter is being celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox on the same day, may the light of peace radiate throughout the Holy Land and the entire world. I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!

Francis was also one of the world’s most outspoken critics of Donald Trump and his presidency. An extraordinary (but perhaps ill-judged) letter sent to American Catholic bishops was widely taken as a rebuke to remarks made by Trump’s Catholic Vice President JD Vance about our duties towards strangers and immigrants. Vance met with Francis only the day before his death — a meeting which seemed to indicate how urgently both men understood it was to build bridges and put the matter behind them.

Francis’s criticism of the Trump administration was entirely in keeping with his lifelong message of standing up for the marginalised. However, the rebuke had put many US Catholics in a bind. Francis had, in effect, asked them to choose between their politics and their conscience — something that previous popes had been reluctant to do for good reason. The fallout from this is still playing out.

A divided Church, an uncertain future

In the final reckoning, Francis has been a hugely important, historic figure in the annals of the Catholic Church. Not only as the first Latin American pope, and the first Jesuit, but as a man who better understood the power of leading by example than any previous pontiff, and as the pope who changed his institution’s tone.

Francis nevertheless leaves behind a Church divided. Conservatives and liberals remain as far apart as ever. In some cases, they are engaged in open hostility with each other. Consider, for example George Weigel’s article which lamented the “melancholy” that overshadowed the tenth anniversary of Francis’s pontificate in 2023, or British Catholic journalist Damian Thompson’s similarly scathing assessment.

As the Catholic Church looks to the future, the next pope will have to build upon Francis’s foundation. He will have to learn from Francis’s mistakes and will need to chart a course that balances the imperative to charity and humility with a slightly different, perhaps more cunning, political acumen.

Yet, for all Francis’s shortcomings, we should remember him as an extraordinary man of passion and compassion, generosity, charisma and courage. He may not have fulfilled Saint Francis’s vision fully but feeling for the poor was genuine. His commitment to dialogue and understanding, and his willingness to tackle difficult issues, even if imperfectly, have left an indelible and enduring mark.

First published on ABC Religion & Ethics, 22 April 2025.

From the Archive: In 2023, the Australian Catholic University announced plans to dismantle the medieval and early modern studies programme where I worked. I wrote this in defence of my colleagues, our work and the value of studying a past that can sometimes seem very distant indeed from modern Australia.

The medieval is part of the mosaic of modern Australia. Our nation’s heritage on this island continent is full of it: in aesthetics, institutions, laws, languages, identities, moralities. Indeed, the very idea of a university is medieval – a concept developed by the Catholic Church around the year 1100.

We have a crown and common law because of old-time kings called Henry. Sydney suburbs called St Ives, St Clair, St Leonards, St Marys reflect medieval England’s big-name saints.

Melbourne’s Luna Park has a giant gaping mouth you walk through to the amusements. Why? Because a medieval design mediated over centuries showed the gates of Hell this way.

All this is part of why the Australian Catholic University’s recent decision to axe dozens of humanities jobs, with the medieval and early modern studies program entirely disbanded, is so controversial.

People sometimes say the Middle Ages don’t matter in this bright new modern age. They were a time of backwardness, violence, racism, homophobia, witch-burnings and so on. Nothing like modern Australia!

There’s no point in taxpayer dollars being spent studying a bunch of lords and peasants and weird men in dresses. If we want to know about that, why not just watch Game of Thrones?

Getting medieval

Medievalists interpret and explain the many meanings imbued in cultural forms and structures we navigate daily. You think the Middle Ages was just a parade of kings and queens – “one damn thing after another” to quote Alan Bennett’s The History Boys? You couldn’t be more wrong.

One “medieval” project at ACU today shows how old religious institutions responded to the problems of housing precarity and homelessness. (Anyone complaining about rent or mortgage payments lately?) Another, shows how contemporary conspiracy theories derive from medieval models. A third, how the solace of medieval spirituality was a key resource for men dying of AIDS in 1980s New South Wales.

You think we have a problem with antisemites now? Let me tell you about Norwich 1144. Islamophobia? You might be interested in the Crusades! Homophobia? What about the medieval legend of “sodomite Christmas”. (Jesus was born and all the gays died?)

Even those Game of Thrones producers have to get their ideas and aesthetics from somewhere. Usually, it’s from what medievalists have told them life was like back then. They talk to us, we consult for them. Industry partnership.

In fact, and paradoxical as it might seem, medieval history has always moved with the times. The fantastic success of the medieval on film courses (and the like) reflects this.

Medievalists just don’t ask the same questions today that the great beardy Bishop Stubbs did when he wrote his Constitutional History of England (the first book I remember mentioned in my first undergrad lecture). We’re concerned with many of the same questions and problems that other boffins study in social sciences, sometimes even hard sciences, law, economics, business and philosophy.

What does it mean to have an emotion, for instance? Neuroscientists can give you one idea. But they can’t help you describe the feeling. A medieval mystic like Margery Kempe can. And the fact that Kempe describes it differently to us is itself important self-knowledge.

It reminds us that the meanings of words change. So many stoushes in Australian public life would be resolved if people could just get a grip on that.

Protecting the narrative around our heritage

For those of us of a liberal disposition there’s another compelling reason to keep the medieval close. We surrender it to less liberal people if we don’t.

My colleague at Deakin, Helen Young, has just won an ARC Future Fellowship to study (among other things) how neo-Nazis and other hate groups use the Middle Ages as a setting for their sick fantasies of white supremacism.

The Catholic Church, an organisation which cops a lot of criticism in Australia, deserves credit for its efforts to preserve an unsanitised, objectively studied medieval past for everyone – giving us resources to counter those who would use it as propaganda against us. The Vatican Library, in the heart of Rome, for instance, isn’t just a setting for Dan Brown page-turners. It is a great treasure of the modern cultural world.

Notorious nonsense that the medieval is “ornamental” to the modern – a silliness once espoused by former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education minister in Britain – needs to be countered all the time. Such sentiments never lie quietly for long.

Just last year, then-Minister Stuart Robert said studying Elizabethan theatre – Shakespeare! – is only important to Great Britain (a political formation that did not exist in Elizabeth’s time).

We need to protect our cultural heritage from efforts to erase them. Especially at a time when we’re debating profound questions about our own society – how we recognise First Nations peoples in Australia, what it means to be Australian – we should make sure we retain a good understanding of the ongoing impacts of the European heritages that are common to many of us.

It’s a necessary resource for our civic debates.

This piece first appeared on The Conversation, 25 September 2023.

From the archive: In 2022, a Catholic priest in Arizona discovered that thousands of baptisms he had performed might be invalid because he had been using the wrong pronoun. The resulting controversy raised some rather larger questions about rules, intentions and what institutions are actually for.

The past week has seen news emerge of a strange but potentially troubling case of Baptisms gone wrong from the diocese of Phoenix, Arizona. The charge against the now former parish priest Andres Arango is that he adapted the text of the liturgical formula used to baptise to suit his own personal tastes.

It further transpires that Arango may have been misapplying baptismal formulae for up to two decades in dioceses in Brazil as well as the United States.

Arango’s variation seems a small one: “I baptise” became “we baptise”. It is hardly the “filioque”. But the Church has maintained that the theological effect of his “error” is too substantial to ignore. In pluralizing the baptising agent the priest implied, improperly, that the congregation rather than Jesus was responsible for the sacrament.

All the baptisms Father Arango undertook will now have to be re-performed by a different priest. So too will a number of other bestowals of sacraments for which correct baptism had been a pre-requisite.

The distress this may cause for those who now find that the Church does not recognise their children as baptised in Christ is incalculable. . Is it right to burden parents with fears for the salvation of their children in this way? Moreover, the Church’s hard-line stance on this issue of wording raises other theological and ethical considerations too. Can it really be the case that God would not recognise the baptism of any departed soul because the priest, his servant, had messed up?

When it comes to Baptism, concerns about administration and efficaciousness go back centuries. Historians still do not know whether the early Church baptised infants or just adults. And theological debate over whether or not infant baptism can be justified has raged for centuries.

On the one hand, there may be terrible jeopardy in not absolving the newborn from Original Sin. What if they are not able to live long enough to be baptised in adulthood, for instance?

On the other hand, those entering the Church perhaps ought to be cognisant of what they are doing.

Sixteenth-century clergy baptised indigenous peoples in the Americas in their thousands but have often received censure from historians for their actions, for by involving so many who had no idea what was being done to them their actions breached faith.

That the same clergy sometimes then later punished those indigenous people for idolatry and heresy makes that breach even more unsettling.

Yet questions about what exactly constitutes a correct Baptism’s defining feature, and what Baptism’s specific effects are, have also been just as contested. Should the spoken words or the splashes of the water on the body matter more? Perhaps it depends on how much weight you attach to sincerity of spirit versus canonical rules or precedents such as the Jewish ritual of tvilah?

The fundamental problem the Church must confront is that, like any organisation, it needs rules of process to function and yet also faces an eternal gap between what rules say and the expectations people have of them. It needs capacity to transcend its own protocols in favour of wider considerations such as popular perceptions or the need to provide mercy to souls.

The risk of simply deferring to a theological logic, as the ecclesiastical authorities appear to have done in Father Arango’s case, is that the conclusions themselves only invite fresh doubts. Can changing one’s pronouns really be enough to invalidate the liturgy? That’s not very “twenty-first-century”. And what of the fact that the Church itself has revised its liturgies regularly over the years? If certain words were good enough at one historical moment why aren’t they in another now?

Do any changes in canonical formulations have implications for Christian souls who received the sacrament under previous, now defunct, ones?

In the past theologians were very good at incorporating people’s concerns about rules into their understandings of God and his works. Hence both Purgatory and Limbo emerged as concepts which grappled with the ethical problem of what to do with those for whom a theological fate of being condemned to Hell seemed manifestly unjust.

We live in a new age of Legalism in the Western World in which process rules, such as those surrounding the baptismal formula sometimes have seemed to acquire a new theological importance far beyond their value as means to ends. But the Church, as an aspirant to higher truths, surely also needs to exercise compassion in how it applies its rules.

Perhaps tellingly, the Church still has no official doctrine on Limbo for infants so it may be wishful thinking to hope for full satisfaction for Father Arango’s disenchanted parishioners.

And yet they have praised him for his gentleness and diligence even as they accept that, in resigning, he has taken the right course.

This piece first appeared on ABC Religion & Ethics, 22 February 2022.

From the archives: In 2021 editors at The Conversation (Australia) asked academics to describe where they would rather be if not locked down in their homes in Sydney or Melbourne. My thoughts took me back to a small village in England where I had spent many happy summers. This version of the text is the original I submitted.

A church, an ancient heap of flints, rises up, cavernous, through mist and marshes. The “Cathedral of the Marshes”, they call it. This is Blythburgh on England’s windswept Suffolk coast.

The landscape here is oppressive, bleak. What man once made is quickly being lost to nature: sea erodes land.

The nearby parish at Easton Bavents fell beneath the waves centuries ago. Bare traces remain of the great medieval port of Dunwich five miles south.

Yet Blythburgh’s Holy Trinity stands tall, majestic even, a near-perfect expression of a mature perpendicular style.

East Anglia is dotted with such archaic oratories, which claim a remarkable hold over the English psyche. These churches are our public monuments, as Simon Jenkins has noted. But they are also memory palaces that enshrine a thousand years or more of history.

Names, dates, materials, shapes: they link us to lives, tastes, communities and faiths of the long forgotten. To visit such a place is to do more than admire. It is to commune with the past, marvelling in its reinvention as a foreign country and at how far we ourselves have come.

Far from the madding crowd

I used to visit Blythburgh as a kid. My Dad liked it here: the lonely desolation a tonic for the hustle and bustle of Cambridge’s university life.

His love of churches inspired me. In Ely and St Edmundsburywe went to cathedrals together. At Orford and Long Melford he showed me the brasses and stained glasses.

But Blythburgh’s impression on me was always greatest. It had atmosphere — that intangible je ne sais quoi that comes from time and place and feeling.

Blythburgh’s mein is wistful and melancholy, the result of centuries of diminishing relevance and (mostly) benign neglect.

This sort of place inspired Benjamin Britten to opera and M. R. James to ghost stories. After all, the set of Peter Grimes and “A warning to the curious” is just a hearty walk away along the coast.

The magic here is that you are never quite sure you are truly alone, however drab or empty the space might seem. Another James story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” tells of an encounter on one of the beaches round about. The protagonist, a young professor, finds a little bronze object which he blows. The rest is all chasing and shadows: pure Gothic horror.

As a kid, the tale terrified me.

Watched over by angels

A church first stood in Blythburgh before 654 CE. That was the year King Penda of Mercia slaughtered King Anna of East Angliaand his son in battle. Anna’s followers brought their bodies here for burial.

The present building is mostly 15th-century. In this part of England those days were what Evelyn Waugh called the fat days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands.

Nearly all the current plan was laid out then: the languid nave, capacious chancel, memorial chapels in the aisles, benches, monuments, font and the immense high-beamed roof.

That roof: it protects the congregation from more than just the elements. A throng of angels, their faces serene but their wings aflutter, stand guard over those who sit on pews below.

The pews themselves are works of art, with carved poppy heads parading saints and seasons, works of mercy and sins personified.

Here, Slander brandishes his tongue, Gluttony his paunch, Hypocrisy his false piety and Sloth his bedgown. There, a man comforts the sick, another visits a prisoner, a third buries his dead.

This kind of delicate, intricate carving demanded the highest levels of skill possessed of medieval craftsmen.

Other churches have their own sacramentals, but Blythburgh’s are amongst the most beautiful and haunting. Spartan white walls and a clear, clean glass clerestory — the bandages of Reformation trauma? — only enhance the effect.

Blythburgh’s decline has been a long time in coming. The Reformation, an early blow, destroyed the priory which abutted the church.

The tower’s steeple fell in 1577 and its lack of resurrection somehow seems to symbolise this part of Suffolk’s gentle retreat thereafter into bucolic backwater.

In the 1640s, “Smasher Dowsing” and his men attacked the church’s art and icons, stripping the roof of half its angels. A parochial itch to shoot at jackdaws nesting in the rafters may have caused further damage in the 18th century.

Victorian antiquaries restored the place to something of its former glory. But today, few come to worship in Blythburgh’s paludal “cathedral”.

The village itself houses just 300 souls and the locality, in the hinterland of a bird sanctuary, is best known as a haven for sailboats and as a twitchers’ paradise.

Inside the tower, a sombre armoured Jack-o-the-Clock from 1682 still keeps time. His baleful inscription: “As the hours pass away, So doth the life of man decay”.

The church, which has borne silent witness to countless other plagues, disasters, and wars, endures even now in its gloomy spot.

I glimpse it still from half a world away, an eerie greyness cloaking it with a salt wind from the sea.

First published by The Conversation, 24 June 2021.

From the archive: In late 2021, the historian John Dickson (now a professor at Wheaton College in the United States) published an essay in ABC Religion & Ethics arguing that historians have good reason to accept the historicity of Jesus. I responded in January 2022, less because I doubted that Jesus existed than because I disagreed with Dickson’s somewhat broad claims about how historians establish what happened in the past. Dickson replied, and I responded again.

I’ve brought my two contributions to the exchange together here because the disagreement was ultimately less about Jesus than about what historians think they can know about the past.

On Historians and the Historicity of Jesus

Just before Christmas John Dickson published an opinion piece in these pages that commented on a surprising finding: fewer than half of living Australians believe Jesus to have been a real historical person. Rather, a majority of us apparently now either accept a statement that he was “a mythical or fictional character” (22%) or else do not know if he was real or not (29%).

The survey dispirited Dickson and understandably so, especially on account of its release just before Christians celebrate Christ’s birthday. Dickson linked the survey’s findings to regular expressions of unbelief in the media. The sceptical attitude many journalists exhibit towards the gospel narratives is now matched amongst the general population it seems.

Dickson contends that such scepticism is “bad news for historical literacy” in Australia, for it flies in the face of “the overwhelming consensus of university historians specialising in the Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century” who do not share it. He relates a “cheeky bet” he first made on Twitter (and later for the ABC) in which he promised to eat a page out of his Bible “if someone could find a full Professor of Ancient History, Classics or New Testament in any real university in the world who argues that Jesus never lived.”

“My Bible has been safe these last seven years,” he notes with mischievous pride.

Deconstructing the Consensus

I am neither an Ancient Historian nor (alas) a full Professor. However, I do have an interest in this subject and an expertise to bring to bear on the question at its heart.

I do not wish to cause Dickson to have to eat his Bible. But, equally, I want to speak out on behalf of colleagues in Classics, Ancient History, New Testament, and Religious History (my own discipline) because I feel Dickson’s article misrepresents where many of us stand. And, in so doing, it does a slight disservice to important areas of scholarship.

Dickson’s argument is problematic in the first instance because it is an argument from authority. His evidence for historical consensus is that apparently authoritative works of reference – he cites the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the Cambridge Ancient History, and the Cambridge History of Judaism – all accept an historical Jesus as a premise. The Cambridge Ancient History, for instance, has a sizeable chapter on the birth of Christianity. Several chapters of the Cambridge History of Judaism mention Jesus in passing “as an interesting figure of Jewish History.”

All this may be true, but it is not itself evidence that Jesus ever existed. It is evidence only of a scholarly consensus in favour of not questioning the premise that he did. And we all know that expert consensuses of this kind can easily be wrong or misguided. Moreover, there are good reasons why such a consensus might have emerged completely autonomously of any assessment of the strength of evidence supporting it.

One such reason is that belief in Jesus’s historicity is not a variable independent of the decision of those who study his life or legacy to do so. Christian faith – which, except very eccentrically, must surely include a belief that Jesus was a real person – has often been a motivating factor in individuals’ decisions to pursue a career in the sorts of academic fields under scrutiny here. In other words, belief in Jesus’s historicity has come a priori of many scholars’ historical study of him and the argument that their acceptance of the ability to study him historically proves his historicity is mere circularity.

Just as significantly, the existence of a critical mass of scholars who do believe in Jesus’s historicity will almost certainly have shaped the way that all other scholars write about the subject. Unless they are strongly motivated to argue that Jesus was not real, they will not arbitrarily provoke colleagues who do believe in his historicity by denying it casually. After all, as academics, we ought to want to advance arguments that persuade our colleagues – and getting them offside by needlessly challenging a point not directly in contention will not help with that.

Sources for the Life of Jesus

I should declare an interest here: my major field is in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European History. The evidence base for Jesus’s life has always seemed rather limited to me compared to those for the figures whom I mostly study. When younger, I studied quite a lot of Ancient History under the tutelage of the brilliant Australian expatriate, now Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Christopher Kelly (Kelly’s Ruling the Later Roman Empire remains seminal to my thinking as an historian). But, ultimately, I found Antiquity unsatisfying. The source base just is not big enough to sustain answers to many of the questions I would want to ask.

A range of Christian sources attest the historical Jesus but how much credence one places in them depends on wider priorities of interpretation. Paul, the earliest writer to mention Jesus, gives only a thin sketch of his life. The gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, recount rather more of the story albeit in slightly contradictory fashions.

But only a small number of non-Christian texts from the first century even mention Jesus. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (c.37–c.100) provides the most famous reference to him in his Antiquities of the Jews. Yet Josephus is not exactly effusive in his description. And none of the references to Jesus in Josephus or any other near contemporary non-Christian text has been accepted by all scholars without its meaning or authenticity coming under scrutiny.

Those in favour of an historical Jesus argue that, even on their own, such resources nevertheless still constitute an enormous body of evidence for a figure who flourished so deep into Antiquity. And such scholars have a point: it is hardly reasonable to ask for extensive Roman records to corroborate such accounts when no similar records have been shown to exist for any comparable figure.

Historians and the practice of History

I thank John Dickson for replying to my critique of his article which claimed that “99 per cent of professional ancient historians” would agree with the view that “Jesus was a real person”. His rebuttal will no doubt interest the ABC’s readers. However, it labours under a fundamental misapprehension about the nature of our disagreement.

As Dickson notes, he and I are not really at odds over the question of whether “Jesus was a real person”. Rather, our dispute concerns what it means to write History.

The question is an important one in Australia in 2022. History, as a discipline of study, is imperilled in this country. Funding for student degrees has been slashed. Academic posts are being retrenched at an alarming pace. Ministers openly question the value of what historians do.

In such circumstances honesty about the nature of our practice, and of its value to our fellow Australians, is important.

I wrote originally because I feared Dickson’s cavalier approach to historiography was counterproductive. And I sense that he still does not quite grasp where the professional majority stands on the points in contention.

I offer the follow additional remarks which address what is at stake in Dickson’s response and in matters arising from it. At the heart of Dickson’s response is a presumption that I am unsympathetic to the study of Ancient History. Not so. I am unsympathetic only to those who would claim History, Ancient or Modern, to be some sort of “fact checking” exercise in which questions like how we prove Jesus’s historicity are of primary interest.

Contra Dickson

Dickson’s response to me contains three substantive elements. First, it plays down his original claim that all ancient historians accept Jesus’s historicity: “The thrust of my piece was merely to note the striking mismatch between public opinion and scholarly opinion on the matter of the historical existence of Jesus”. Dickson accepts my contention that the fact “that secular specialists, by an overwhelming majority, accept the historical existence of Jesus does not amount to actual evidence of Jesus’s existence”. However, he critiques my claim that the apparent consensus around Jesus’s historicity is simply an unspoken agreement not to challenge an assumption.

Second, Dickson offers some quibbles about my comprehension of debates surrounding ancient sources. And, third, he reiterates the multiplicity of ancient sources that attest to Jesus’s life. For Dickson, this multiplicity is of itself persuasive.

These latter two points are minor and not worth dealing with in detail. I note only 1) that Dickson presents merely the most prevalent explanation for how the Gospel sources are related to each other. My original phrasing tried to indicate that the academy also advances other explanations (I do not comment on the different explanations’ relative merits). And 2) I reiterate my observation that the number of sources for Jesus’s life may indeed be suggestive but that historians will never agree how many are enough to demonstrate his historicity. The more so when the provenance of those sources, like the nature of their interrelation, is so easily contested.

But what to say about Dickson’s main argument? First, it might be noted that he does not address the substance of my complaint, which is that “in merely noting the striking mismatch” he compares apples and oranges. The “public opinion” he cites was a controlled survey in which people were asked an explicit question. The scholarly opinion he assesses, by contrast, is not the product of responses to a similarly specific prompt.

This difference in the nature of the things under comparison matters. The public survey contrasted two perspectives: Jesus was historical or is mythical. Most historians do not accept the premise of such a dichotomy, so it misleads to portray them as “historicists” within its frame of reference.

What Dickson in fact shows in his original piece is that many ancient historians assume the existence of Jesus in their writing. Only in very few cases do they assess the evidence for Jesus’s historicity actively. And the literature on this subject is – at the risk of sounding slightly ungenerous to those who research the topic – somewhat niche. It is not, in most cases, written by distinguished post-holders at well-known universities nor is it published by major university presses.

Moreover, Dickson considers only those scholars whose writings either affirm or deny Jesus’s historicity explicitly, which commits a further fallacy: he assumes that the far more numerous group of scholars who have said absolutely nothing at all on this subject hold no views on it.

Most ancient historians of my acquaintance, like historians of Christianity in other periods, have research interests and expertises that could be brought to bear on questions about the historical Jesus if they wished to investigate such questions. Yet they (and I include myself here) choose to occupy their time examining other things. Why?

It might be that they agree with Dickson that Jesus’s historicity is incontestable. But it is far more likely that most of them do not believe the matter can be resolved within the normal parameters of historical study. Pursuing it would thus constitute an unproductive use of their valuable research time.

The Practice of History: Ancient and Modern

Let me turn next to what we might term the more personal element to Dickson’s response to me. Dickson alleges I am motivated by a “certain dissatisfaction with the study of Antiquity”. Indeed, at the start of his piece he claims that: “To a significant degree, his argument stems from a complaint that my discipline of Ancient History is not more like his, Early Modern European History”.

“It would be wonderful if researchers of Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Jesus of Nazareth had the wealth of sources available to experts on Galileo, Henry VIII, and Martin Luther. Sadly, we do not”.

I agree, it would be gratifying if ancient historians had access to the same depth and range of sources as historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries do. However, once again, Dickson misses the central point.

I hold that the study of Antiquity is not a categorically separate discipline from the study of any other historical period. It employs the same methods of historical study. However, it presents so few surviving sources that scholars must read every one they deem relevant as closely and carefully as possible. It also follows that the conclusions that they draw from those sources will necessarily be more tentative and doubtful than if they had a wider range of sources to support their positions.

Personally, I prefer to work on later historical periods because I seek a higher degree of confidence in major paradigm-setting conclusions than the study of Antiquity usually permits. Moreover, I am not by temperament attracted to the intense scrutiny of the precise meaning of surviving texts, and the meticulous comparison of such texts, which working with ancient sources necessarily requires.

But this prefigures no animosity towards those sources, nor to the societies that gave rise to them, nor to the historians who work with them, nor to the questions those historians ask.

Apropos of these observations, I should like to note a trifling infelicity in Dickson’s initial article which it seemed churlish to point out until he suggested my quarrel with ancient historians is that they “are not as critically aware as they should be”.

Dickson’s fourth paragraph claims to cite the Apostles’ Creed, a fifth-century statement of faith: “Jesus was a real person, ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate’, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it.”

Actually, the Apostles’ Creed says Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried”. Dickson’s line is from Rufinus’s version of the Old Roman Symbol, a text which slightly predates the Apostles’ Creed. This misquotation is unfortunate for it hardly demonstrates the accuracy of reading for which ancient historians are rightly renowned.

What does Dickson believe?

All this brings me to my most acute objection to what Dickson wrote. History is, at root, an interpretative discipline. Historians seek to understand past societies: their beliefs, their values, how their members lived. We do that through a process of argumentation in which we construct theses from evidence. These theses are necessarily interpretative: we aim not merely to establish but to explain.

Dickson, however, just doesn’t seem to see things that way. And he is a touch disingenuous when he claims that his original piece sought only to highlight the mismatch between public and scholarly opinion: “At no point was I even hinting — as Pattenden seems to imply — that ‘this historical person was unequivocally equivalent to the biblical Jesus’”.

Dickson very much does make such a claim in his original article and his purpose in citing texts such as the Cambridge Ancient History and the Cambridge History of Judaism would certainly appear to have been to invoke their authority in support of it. In paragraph two he makes his claim indirectly, offering a series of statements attacked in the “secular media”:

“Each year as Christmas approaches, the faithful are used to reading stories in the “secular media” providing a take-down of our beloved story. The star of Bethlehem never happened. The three wise men are inventions. And the virgin birth is a typical trope of ancient myth. But such scandalous claims are usually interpreted in church circles as clickbait scepticism, and not representative of mainstream Australia”.

By characterising these episodes in the life of the biblical Jesus as “our beloved story” Dickson hardly projects indifference as to their historical truth. More significant, however, is this extended quotation from his fourth paragraph (part of which I mentioned above):

“One of the unique selling points of the Christian faith — in the minds of believers — is that it centres on real events that occurred in time and space. Christianity is not based on someone’s solitary dream or private vision. It isn’t merely a divine dictation in a holy book that has to be believed with blind faith. Jesus was a real person, “crucified under Pontius Pilate”, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it [sic]”.

These lines clearly assert that the Jesus Christians worship was a real historical person: in “the minds of believers” his story is one of “real events that occurred in time and space”. Now, it’s just possible that Dickson intended merely to describe the thought processes of believing Christians here rather than to offer his own heartfelt perspective. But since Dickson is a very public Evangelical Christian – and therefore also a very public believer – I do not find such a distinction credible.

It is hard to believe anyone would read these words and come to any conclusion other than that Dickson was indeed asserting the historical truth of the biblical Jesus, not merely the historicity of some putative “historical” person lacking in further characteristics beyond a sole foundational aspect to his identity.

And, in fact, Dickson does qualify a further basic criterion for “Jesus” to be the historical Jesus: he must be not merely a man with the name “Jesus” but one who was “crucified under Pontius Pilate”. Yet what does this statement mean if not that Dickson seeks to ground identification of the historical Jesus in the Gospel narratives? And, frankly, why bring a much later source, such as the Apostles’ Creed, into a discussion of Jesus’s historicity at all?

I can fully understand why it might be uncomfortable for a believing Christian to confront the paradox that Jesus is Antiquity’s most consequential figure and yet is not treated as a proportionately serious subject of historical study by professional academics. All Christians must ultimately confront that paradox, though many will respond to it quite differently to Dickson.

“We can believe what we choose”, wrote John Henry Newman in 1848. “We are answerable for what we choose to believe; if we believe lightly, or if we are hard of belief, in either case we do wrong”.

First published by ABC Religion & Ethics, 19 January and 8 February 2022.

From the archive: I wrote this review of the first two volumes of George Pell's Prison Journal for ABC Religion & Ethics in 2021. Pell died in 2023, but I have left the piece substantially as it appeared at the time.

Here in Victoria, everyone seems to have made up their mind about George Pell. His hard-line moral and theological positions infuriate liberals inside and outside the Catholic Church, and hence his conviction on five counts of serious offences against children in 2019 presented a kind of wicked irony. But when, in 2020, the Australian High Court upheld Pell’s appeal against his conviction with a 7-0 judgment, grave doubts were raised about the efficacy, competence, and impartiality of criminal justice in this state.

Pell himself has returned to Rome but now seeks to maintain his place in the public eye through the publication of his prison journal. Nevertheless, many Australians — not least in Melbourne — remain as suspicious of him as ever. The court of public opinion apparently cannot quite yet stomach the acquittal bestowed on him by the appellate judges.

Pell’s journal, which chronicles his thirteen months in prison, provides a fascinating insight into the mind of one of the more remarkable Australians of his generation. As an historical document it may even prove an invaluable witness to the causes of his notoriety. Whether or not it rehabilitates him in the eyes of the public, it certainly deserves full appraisal in those terms.

The Cardinal writes his journal

Pell’s journal begins on the day he was taken into custody (27 February 2019) and continues — so we are led to believe, although at the time of writing only the first two(of three) volumes have been released — until his final release from prison in April 2020. The story arc thus far has included his initial remand, his sentencing, his failed appeal to the Victorian Court of Appeal, and his lawyers’ efforts to persuade the Australian High Court of the need for a further review. Pell tells us repeatedly that he writes to help him process and understand his ordeal. So: “Writing this diary helps … Only today, a prisoner wrote to me explaining that he writes letters to keep his sanity” (25 July 2019); “Facing up to such a prospect [of three more years in jail], by writing about it is already a help” (21 August 2019).

A typical Pell entry is around 700-800 words long. On 18 August 2019, he expresses a desire to reduce his output but the setback to his appeal seems, if anything, to have caused him to double down. Earlier, on 6 July, he explains his technique of composition: “Usually I write my daily entry on the same day. However, I am writing this on Sunday, as I spent yesterday reading, before watching an excellent program on Windsor Castle, and then Footscray unexpectedly beat Geelong in the AFL.”

The impression Pell seeks to give is that each scribbling is an honest-to-God stream-of-consciousness chain of thought from a tidy — indeed, unusually methodical — mind. But can that be the whole story? Why edit and annotate these volumes so carefully, as he has obviously done, if not to curate that consciousness? And what are the implications of Pell having done this?

The Sydney Morning Herald’s reviewer has declared Pell to be “like a man of God trying to make the best of his own ordeal, passionately concerned about human souls and ‘offering up’, as Christians used to say, his own trivial sufferings for the redemptive sufferings of Christ.” And yet a suspicion lingers that Pell would not have laboured over this journal so long and hard had he been entirely indifferent to the prospect that it would one day be read by the world.

The real challenge for an historian is how to separate out what Pell wants us to read — his self-fashioning, in our own ‘postmodern’ parlance — from what the text reveals about him inadvertently. Moreover, trust, the diarist’s greatest resource when he invites the reader into his private world, is hard earned but easily squandered by hidden agenda. And, in the wake of what the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuses has said about Pell since his acquittal, trust in him is not in abundance.

Pell’s prison life

The great variety of observations about prison life, about the Vatican, Australian culture, and the human condition certainly make substantial parts of Pell’s journal riveting reading. Those not already familiar with the cardinal’s biography will be introduced to his great love for Aussie Rules and cricket; his support of Brexit; his guarded scepticism towards Pope Francis, modernity, and climate change; his instinctual distaste for Donald Trump.

Liturgical cycles and the Christian calendar naturally also play a major role in structuring Pell’s prison existence. Holy Week and Easter Week punctuate the chapter titles of the first volume, and they provide the opening for almost meditative ruminations on the essence of redemption and on mortal suffering. A rhythmic life is clearly also something Pell craves — and to achieve it he relies not only on the repetitiveness of prison routine but also on the orderly timetable he sets himself for writing journal entries. There is method to his literary technique. The mise-en-scène which segues into a reflection about higher things; the sharp observations on matters of sensitivity and current interest; the asides which hint at a broader cultural and intellectual hinterland.

Pell’s extensive and persuasive name-dropping must have challenged the text’s editors, upon whom the task of contextualising all the august personages seems likely to have been devolved. Pell is a man who knows people who matter. That much comes as no surprise. The revelation is just how much he appears to enjoy the performative element of describing his interactions with them.

Pell’s prison diaries remind me of nothing so much as those earlier accounts of cardinals stuck in the cramped and stuffy environment of a pre-1978 papal conclave. The ersatz single-room dwelling erected from timber on the Vatican’s stone floors, the truncated lists of permitted possessions (subject to searches), the indignities of comforts denied and privacy constricted — would that Pell’s erudition had brought him to recognise the similarities. Pell might even have pondered on how other cardinals thus bore similar physical hardships to those he endured, sometimes for up to six months at a time. Acknowledging this might have allowed him to focus more on articulating the mental anguish which the false accusations against him undoubtedly caused.

And yet there is more to Pell’s journal than anecdote and observation: it is a key resource in his attempt to defend his honour and integrity in the wake of being charged, tried, and convicted of an especially heinous crime. Pell is clearly a man of high intelligence and remarkable powers of self-restraint. Not for him the wallowing self-pity that would surely have marked out many a putative diarist in his position. His strategy is to dissect the inconsistencies in the case made against him with forensic precision, while simultaneously showing that he fully appreciates and respects the suffering of genuine victims of the crime of which he stands accused.

“The paedophilia crisis remains the greatest blow the Church has suffered in Australia. So many terrible crimes, and so many among them horrendous”, he rightly notes on 10 March 2019. “Part of the paedophilia crisis is the folly of the bishops”, he reflects further on 13 June: “Few bishops, if any, suspected the enormity of the crisis; few, even among the experts, recognized the extent of the personal damage done to many victims.” He writes approvingly on 30 March that not one of the eighty-eight correspondents whose letters of encouragement have arrived that day express hostility to victims in general. He further concurs with one who tells him that a false claim of innocence is almost more transgressive in moral terms than the original offence.

Yet Pell distinguishes the need for compassion for the victims with the need to prevent miscarriages of justice. So, he writes on 10 March: “to require accusers to prove their case is not to be antivictim, but to establish that they are victims.” And the case against him is certainly troubling: why is his accuser’s credibility accepted so readily while the impressive testimony of the defence witnesses is rejected? What of the disturbing parallels between the complaint made against him and that against a quite different priest in America?

Pell’s praise for Justice Mark Weinberg’s dissenting judgment in the Victorian Court of Appeal, where the Pell’s conviction was confirmed by a 2-1 majority, is fulsome and no doubt sincere. Weinberg’s judgment reinforces Pell’s belief that, in the end, justice will be done, and all will be well. The inspirational message Pell hopes us to take that he was right to place his trust in God. The historical irony of the Catholic cardinal placing his faith in a Jewish judge is left unnoted.

Interpreting Pell

What then is there for an interested historian (or layman) to discover from Pell’s journal? Perhaps the first thing to note, as I’ve already mentioned in passing, is its author’s curious lack of historical awareness about the position in which he has found himself. Senior churchmen have always been vulnerable to false charges and rough justice — sometimes through the machinations of a ruthless or kleptocratic government, at other times at the hands of an angry mob. The challenge for contemporary states is self-evidently going to be how to provide justice for senior clergy — or, indeed, any clergy — when those clergy find themselves accused of emotive crimes and at the heart of hostile media storms in increasingly anticlerical societies. The State of Victoria presumably wished justice for Pell as well as for those who claimed to be his victims. Yet the evidence of the High Court’s judgment is that it flunked this test badly. At best we might say the wheels of justice turned, but they turned slowly and not through a full 360 degrees.

The specific case against Pell always looked implausible, even to someone with limited knowledge of the mechanics of the Melbourne high mass or St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s topography. On the other hand, Catholic leadership in Australia — and worldwide — hardly seem to have faced a full reckoning for its collective complicitly in turning a blind eye, or even covering-up, acts of frankly shocking depravity.

Pell’s acquittal on the narrow technical ground that he did not commit the crimes for which he was charged on the indictment was never going to provide closure or catharsis for the many Catholics and non-Catholics who sympathise with the scores of victims of other priests. For such persons, Pell’s victory is, at best, a pyrrhic one. And how does his acquittal prevent crimes of the nature of the one of which he was accused from happening again?

Pell places his faith in the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse from 2017. However, most of those recommendations have yet to be implemented. The sneaking suspicion, however unfair, is that if the threat of damnation and the teachings of the Church have not deterred the kind of wrongdoing of which Pell was accused, then no mere recommendations will ever be completely effective against the powerful sexual urges that are responsible for this kind of criminality. And why should it be for the government to set the Church’s own house in order? Should not her bishops take greater responsibility for what has happened on their watch?

A figure in denial

The problem with Pell — at least, as presented in his journal — is that, in the end, he shows only vague and limited willingness in it to confront such quandaries. Pell’s statements acknowledging the extent of abuse and its tragic effects on victims are also less powerful in their humility when they appear in conjunction with others such as these:

• “if anyone in the mid-nineties knew the extent of the problem, they did not say so publicly, or to me privately” (10 March);

• “The bishops broke the back of the paedophile crisis nearly twenty-five year ago with Towards Healing and the Melbourne Response (6 October);

• “One senior retired politician explained to me that the Royal Commission … demonstrated that the problem was not unique to Catholics … Public opinion, however, cannot grapple with the sad reality that 95 percent plus of the sexual abuse of minors occurs outside institutions” (30 March);

• “Unfortunately, the Royal Commission became more anti-Catholic as it progressed and the televising of the hearings produced something like the Soviet Union show trials” (6 October).

Such assessments may be valid on many levels, but they are not peace-making; they pass the buck and verge on the hubristic or inflammatory. Pell’s tendency, shared by many of his supporters, to see himself as some sort of conservative martyr is also not going to assist reconciliation.

On 28 August 2019, Pell likens the prospect that he might have to spend another three years in prison to Jesus’ Passion (“not productive in any worldly sense, a painful ‘waste of time’”). “Jesus’ suffering was redemptive and can purify and vivify my suffering”, he adds. This is a far cry from his 9 March declaration that “naturally I feel uneasy and embarrassed being compared to the Lord; or even to Thomas More or John the Baptist”.

George Weigel, in his introduction to the first volume, compares Pell to the persecuted French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935). But Dreyfus’s show trial, one of the most controversial and polarising political dramas of modern European history, convicted a man who was not only entirely innocent of the crimes of which he stood accused, but was himself the victim of an ugly and grotesque antisemitism. Weigel presumably sees the parallel in the following terms: Dreyfus was suspected because he was a Jew, Pell because he was a Catholic archbishop. Yet, the parallel is far from exact. Dreyfus bore no responsibility nor culpability for the fact that French military secrets were passed to the Germans. Pell can hardly claim that same distance from the malign actions of priests under his charge. And those most critical of Pell are not, as with Dreyfus, hostile elites but include outraged fellow Catholics.

The Church’s future in Australia

If Pell had really wanted to engage the Church’s critics in a propitiative dialogue, he might have done better to reflect less on how to relativise the Church’s guilt and more on how to show regret about the things that escaped his oversight. He could even have said a good deal more about what more might be done about them now to prevent their reoccurrence. The road to redemption surely lies in that direction.

The key question for Pell and everyone else remains how to hold accountable an institution that aspires to a higher standard of conduct than secular institutions (for if the Catholic Church is not a shining beacon in such matters, then it is nothing). Clearly it cannot be enough merely for Church leaders to highlight their compliance with legal frameworks while formulating prosaic expressions of personal or institutional contrition.

Not that this is exactly the tone Pell strikes when, for instance, he pronounces that “those who have remained loyal to the Church in spite of the scandals need to be reassured that the leadership is not following the line of the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the ABC” (6 October). Nor is it quite his emphasis when he admonishes: “We must be vigilant, striving to improve our procedures because the enemies of the Church will exploit any weakness, especially when they can no longer rerun the stories of the paedophilia scandals” (14 November).

So, what might Pell have done? One option might have been to take responsibility and resign in shame, even though he bore no personal culpability, because the honour of his institution demanded it. But the problem with such an approach, which Pell would doubtless acknowledge, is that side-lining leaders causes significant loss of institutional memory for no clear-cut gain. And it would exacerbate the Church’s even less straightforwardly soluble root problem: there is a shortage of priests throughout the Western world because being a priest is simply no longer the respected vocation it once was. Gone are the days when a large Irish or Italian family expected one of its sons to enter the Church: Catholic parents have fewer offspring and those offspring have more life choices open to them for their own education, family life, and social advancement. A vicious reinforcing feedback loop also operates: the priesthood’s loss of status and respectability lowers numbers of vocations and the quality of the pool from which the Church is able to select its ordinands.

That Pell does not want to confront this issue is understandable. But for those who recognise the good the Church can do, it disconcerts and limits the value of what can be taken away from one man’s trials and tribulations.

First published by ABC Religion & Ethics on 7 May 2021. The original can be read here.