Does BA Santamaria exert more power today than ever before in Aus society? (Main Forum)

Fundamentally George Pell is continuing to try and impose the Santamaria agenda and vision for Catholicism on this nation.

I think this is true and I think he will fail.

I view it slightly differently, Enda. I think Pell has already succeeded at least in controlling the church (and there are interesting parallels between that and Abbott which I'll outline in a minute). The question is what will his "success" render for the institution in this country? My bet is more exiting the pews until he's left with about a 5% remnant church. Whether anybody then calls that "success" is an entirely different question.

The commonality I'd draw between Pell and Abbott and what they both learned from Bob Santamaria is this. Whatever might be said about Santamaria he was a superb politician, in the sense of "manipulator of the numbers", from a position where he was never elected to any parliament and from a position where he never had some large army or cohort of workers. He learned well from the Communists, Trotskyites and Marxists whom he despised — how to manipulate large populations with a small minority of committed disciples. From a totally hopeless position, numbers' wise, at one stage he was dictating major policy positions for this entire nation. Pell and Abbott have similarly learned those same lessons well. David Marr's essay is a major study in this. There must be less than half a dozen of the former DLP Catholics in the Liberal Party but effectively Abbott has controlled the agenda. (By the way Turnbull is a Catholic but not in the DLP-type, Santamaria mould.) It IS a huge skill to be able to do that.

Pell has done the same with the Australian bishops. He's never had broad support amongst the majority of his fellow bishops. With the initial leg-up from JPII though — and by effectively taking control of three of the most wealthy archdiocese — Sydney, Melbourne and defacto support from Perth — he's had an effective veto over the Church. (A bit like the veto exercised by the United Nations Security Council that we see stuffing up the search for a resolution over the Syrian situation at the moment.) Most bishops are simply not "political animals" and they are no match for George Pell in any political contest. They're elevated up through the ranks and honestly do see themselves "toiling in the Lord's vineyard" and see themselves principally as helping their local communities. I sense many of them are almost totally naïve about political manipulation and what is going on at the national and international level.

The saddest thing is that, looking into the future, there is a total dearth of talent — either with any "political skills" remotely approaching George Pell's, or with some "vision" to undo all the damage George Pell (and JPII/BXVI) have wreaked on the Australian Church. This national church, compared to many others in the world, had the good fortune to be left in an extremely good financial, infrastructure and personnel position because of a fortuitous confluence of events in Australia in the 1960s. Even with all those resources, without an "agenda" or "vision" that is somewhere close to the aspirations of the broad mass of the people, or adequate "political skills" in the face of a minority abusing their political skills, the future I think is bleak. Mark Coleridge seems to be viewed at present as the logical successor to Pell (who will retire within about 5 years) but Coleridge might be far worse even than George Pell.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]