same about Syria. unlikely Pell ever said much about the Christians threatened there or the oldest Christian towns being saved from ISIS by Hezbollah
January 2, 2004 — 11.00am
John Howard went on holiday yesterday, with a cardinal's blessing. George Pell, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, wished him well, saying that the Prime Minister was in a tough business and needed his rest more than most of us.
No such luck for the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. His return from his Christmas holiday break was greeted by withering attacks from two of Britain's leading Anglican clerics.
He was accused by one of "acting like a white vigilante" over his commitment of British troops to the removal of Saddam Hussein and another said he would have to answer to "a higher authority" for these actions.
One cleric, the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, said the conservative Christians who influenced President George Bush and Blair to go to war in Iraq espoused "a very strange distortion of Christianity".
From their Christmas season pulpits, Australia's church leaders were much more polite. No one actually mentioned the war. No one directly criticised the Prime Minister. As far as Iraq is concerned, the church in Australia seems to have taken the Prime Minister's advice and moved on.
Alexander Downer will be very pleased with himself if this is so.
Downer, who has developed a schizophrenic political personality which sees him switch in an instant from moderate and reasonable to arrogant and overbearing, has accused Australian church leaders of meddling in politics at the expense of their pastoral obligations.
Downer branded some church leaders as headline seekers pursuing popular political causes and acting as "amateurish political commentators" on issues on which the church itself had not resolved its view, nor even engaged. This, he said, cut across the central role of the church "in providing spiritual comfort and moral guidance for the community".
In a speech to the National Press Club in which he savaged a broad collection of critics of the Government as having a "little Australia" mentality and a weird kind of "self-disgust" Downer referred to "unstoppable and invincibly ignorant" people in the Australian clerical elite who had accused the Government, on the slenderest evidence, of damaging Australia's international reputation and making Australians less compassionate people.
Downer named the liberal Anglican Primate Peter Carnley as one of his targets. But there have been other meddlesome priests, most notably the Catholic Bishop of Canberra, Pat Power, who clashed directly with the Prime Minister at a church service in Canberra at the time of the Iraq war.
Other church leaders have been more sympathetic to the Government's position on various issues. Pell, who received an early and confident endorsement from Howard when he was subjected to subsequently dismissed allegations of sexual misconduct, stopped short of endorsing the Iraq war but spelt out the case for a just war. Peter Hollingworth went further, saying he believed war to remove Saddam Hussein could be justified on religious grounds.
