Remembering George Cardinal Pell

NOT long after we said goodbye to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died at 95 in his papal retirement home at Mater Ecclesiae monastery at the Vatican gardens on Dec. 31, 2022, we also lost George Cardinal Pell, one of the larger pillars (physically and intellectually) of the Roman Catholic Church, on Jan. 10, 2023 at the Salvator Mundi International Hospital in Rome. He was 81, and died of cardiac arrest after undergoing a successful hip replacement surgery.

On January 14, Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, and dozens of cardinals and bishops concelebrated the requiem Mass in his honor at the apse of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. These included Italian Cardinals Domenico Calcagnio and Giovanni Angelou Becciu, who did not always share Cardinal Pell's position on the Vatican financial reforms; Czechoslovakia-born Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., whose doctoral dissertation on Feuerbach, Marx and Religion the scholar Pell reportedly found disappointing; Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the retired vicar of Rome; the American cardinals Raymond Burke, James Harvey and Edwin O'Brien; the Nigerian nonagenarian Francis Arinze; and the only non-episcopal concelebrant, Pell's priest-secretary Fr. Joseph Hamilton.