George Pell has got the cred

When Cardinal Pell read the Koran, he had to stop counting the invocations of violence after reading "50, 60 or 70 pages". Gary Scarrabelotti discusses the recent comments of Sydney's Archbishop on Islam's resurgence.

Sometimes you hear or read something that takes your breath away, and you say to yourself, “I wish I’d said that!” These are moments of wonder and simple pleasure.

Then there are times when you hear or read something that takes your breath away for another reason: they were precisely your own thoughts to which another had given expression. Such moments can be mysterious and disturbing. To think that between people who have no social connection an unspoken understanding can arise, as if speech had passed between them in secret.

I had one of these experiences the other day when I followed up a suggestion that I read an interview by John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter with Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney.

Allen had tracked down Pell in Rome at the end of May this year where he was attending a meeting of the Vox Clara Commission. This is the committee of English-speaking bishops that advises the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments about the translation of the new liturgy. Allen was keen to talk to Pell, but only passingly about Vox Clara. He wanted to talk to the Cardinal because Pell was news – and he was news because of what he was saying about an immense challenge confronting the Western world now and for generations to come.

Back in April, Pell had been the guest of Legatus, a group of Catholic businessmen that met for their summit in Naples – that’s Naples, Florida. His subject was Islam and Western Democracies, and in his address Pell made the point that “Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion.”

This is what got everyone talking. You see, almost everyone, from the three Anglo Amigos – George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard – to their most bitter critics, have been telling us that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.

Pell’s address to Legatus is just what you would expect from a trained historian. It is backed by broad reading and strives for the balanced judgement. It also has vigour. George Pell is no colourless fellow, and his words convey character.

Unfortunately it is Pell “the character”, and the media’s love-hate attraction to it, as much as to the punchy things he often has to say, that really irks some people – like, for example, Paul Collins and his liberal Catholic set. Old PC, who by all accounts has made a good living out of being a media darling and “new church” spokesman, was clearly infuriated by, and perhaps jealous of, Pell’s recently achieved international media cachet. Collins took the opportunity of a piece in The Australian on 10 May to set everyone straight. Whether in Naples, Florida, or in any other forum, bovver boy Pell represents “no one but himself …” and certainly not “Australian Catholicism”.

Collins had a number of “issues” with Pell. At one point in his Naples address Pell argued that the grounds for pessimism about Islam’s peaceful potential began with the Koran itself.

“In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down the invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned the exercise after 50, or 60, or 70 pages.”

Actually, I think I know how Pell felt. There comes a point where one begins to suffocate under the weight of the evidence. The core Islamic texts, the record of Islamic history, convey a clear and unmistakeable message. Between Islam, and the rest of the world – and here I press Pell’s argument further than he did – there can be no peace. There can only ever be temporary truces during which the House of Islam recovers its strength. Whatever else many Muslims might have believed, taught, and practiced from time to time and in different places, this is the authentic religion of Muhammad. It is to this source to which would-be Islamic “reformers” return whenever they wish to recover the power of Islam. In so far as “moderate Muslims” believe in peace and tolerance in a way comprehensible to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, or Western secularists, then so far (thankfully) have they ceased to believe in the religion of Muhammad. It is a shift that we ought to encourage.

A great deal more can be said on the different Islams and their connection with Muhammad’s “revelations” (the Koran) and his table talk (the Hadith) than could possibly be compassed in a short article. But one commentator, with all the deftness of someone at home with theological discourse, recently summed up the problem confronting so-called “moderate Muslims” and those Westerners who insist that with them we can talk the same language.

“I hesitate to rush in where so many better-informed people have hesitated to tread, or have trodden before, but I would put it like this. The urge to domination is nearly a constant of human history. The specific (and baleful) contribution of Islam is that, by attributing sovereignty solely to God, and by pretending in a philosophically primitive way that God’s will is knowable independently of human interpretation, and therefore of human interest and desire-in short by allowing nothing to human as against divine nature-it tries to abolish politics. All compromises become mere truces; there is no virtue in compromise in itself. Thus Islam is inherently an unsettling and dangerous factor in world politics, independently of the actual conduct of many Muslims."

On the question of Islamic “revelation”, this reads like something from one of Peter Sewald’s interviews with the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. It could even have fitted neatly into Pell’s Naples speech. But it was actually Theodore Dalrymple, a secularist of conservative bent, writing on 4 June in the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly City Journal. If you want to understand Islam, theology matters even to unbelievers.

So far, then, from making “Catholicism look silly”, as Collins says, Pell is at the cutting edge of contemporary Western thinking about Islam. Media poseurs might bitch and snipe, but people who decide the fate of nations are paying attention whether or not they like what they hear. After a forty-year holiday, the Cardinals of the Catholic Church, led by men like Pell, have resumed “reading the signs of the times” and making themselves heard. Not only that – and here is the other reason why Allen wanted to do this interview – Pell was not speaking for himself. He was speaking for Pope Ratzinger.

“Popes only rarely lead by decree. Far more often, their example is decisive, pointing a new direction by what they do and say.

“Such has been the case under Benedict XVI on Islam. There's been no Vatican edict, but everyone recognizes something has changed. It's not that Benedict created a more hawkish climate on Islam; those currents were always present, and gathered steam in the post-9/11 period. It's rather that Benedict has unleashed them.”

According to Allen, Pell’s Naples speech was a case in point.

Anyone who understands Pell – his reverence for the Holy See, his connection with Ratzinger, his having been one of the “grand electors” in the recent conclave – would sense the credibility of Allen’s analysis and see its implications. The Church has altered course, and it is leaving the partisans of yesterday’s shibboleths shrieking and squealing in its wake. It’s no fun being turned into an anachronism.

The sudden change in direction and tone by Rome and its key spokesmen is not limited to the nature of Islam. Rome’s new strategic assessment embraces Islam, Western culture (especially Western European culture), the Church, and the triad of relationships with each other formed by the three. It has been accompanied, moreover, by a double warning: a warning to Catholics about what the West is capable of, and a warning to the West about what awaits it if it misreads the nature of Islam. Pell sketched for Allen a scenario of grim realism, the central point of which emerged in the following exchange:

Allen: You spoke in passing about Muslim immigration in the West, and that we tend to think of the religious affiliation of immigrants as irrelevant. Do you think there should be restrictions on Muslim immigration in the West, along the lines suggested some years ago by Cardinal Giacomo Biffi?

Pell: He got into all sorts of trouble for suggesting there should be limits, but he’s raised a very real and interesting question that needs to be debated and discussed calmly, not in the aftermath of some atrocity when there could be a ferocious and horrendous reaction against Muslims.

Allen: Why are some forces resistant to discussing the religious dimension of immigration policy? Is it just religious indifference?

Pell: I think it’s deeper than that. I think some seculars are so deeply anti-Christian, that anyone opposed to Christianity is seen as their ally. That could be one of the most spectacularly disastrous miscalculations in history.

This is what snatched the breath out of me. Christians in Europe are caught between a resurgent Islam that dreams of the day when by force of demography it will possess Europe for itself, and an anti-Christian governing and intellectual class among whom there are those ready to contemplate using Islam within Europe to erase the last vestiges of Catholic influence. It is an alliance that would devour Europe’s elite before it swallowed up Europe’s Catholic remnant.

Allen: Is that just your gut instinct?

Pell: I don’t know whether I’ve read this or not, but I sense it. It’s not an established thesis.

Spot on again, George. I’ve never read it anywhere either. But I sense it. In fact, I’ve seen something like it, in embryonic miniature, in the Australian Capital Territory where I live. Here we have a Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, who has given us the most liberal abortion laws in Australia, adoptions for homosexual couples, and now proposes “civil unions” for them. This is the same cove who rushed to our local (and radical) Yarralumla mosque to bow and scrape and express solidarity when obliged by the Prime Minister and Premiers to fall into line over a new anti-terrorism regime.

The message is pretty clear. And, you know, George, we’re not alone in getting it. Even Paul Collins can see that “Catholics have certainly had to cop it sweet a lot lately.” I reckon that once he gets over being upstaged, he’ll get it too.

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