David Marr, the celebrated journalist, has done it again. First he psychoanalysed the rabid Kevin Rudd in his essay Power Play. (Rudd’s caucus sacked him as prime minister soon afterwards.) Then, less successfully, Marr took on the opportunist Tony Abbott in his Political Animal. (Abbott brushed him off as you might a mosquito.) Now in Quarterly Essay 51 Marr has set his sights higher still. In The Prince. Faith, Abuse and George Pell, Marr becomes a latter-day Titus Oates exposing, as he sees it, Cardinal Pell’s temporising role in Roman Catholic conspiracies to cover up the crimes of child sexual abuse in the Church. Not satisfied with the State inquiries in Victoria and New South Wales, Julia Gillard set up a Commonwealth Royal Commission, which she boasted would change Australia. Marr hopes she is right. But he is not so sure.

The ‘backbone’ of his essay, Marr says, is Cardinal Pell’s four and a half hours on 27 May before the Inquiry by the Family and Community Development Committee of the Victorian Parliament into ‘the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations’. The term ‘handling’ covers anything from spiritual exercises or psychiatric treatments to destroying incriminating documents, paying victims hush money, or moving offenders to new parishes or new duties. This framework allows Marr to detail both proven cases and unproven allegations. His underlying idea is the Great Catholic Cover-Up.

Marr sets the scene in the Victorian Parliament with his usual panache. No one rose when the Cardinal entered. ‘He was in civvies: black suit, white shirt, no jewellery.’ He never lost his temper, but his colour rose all afternoon. ‘He droned. He snapped.’ His gaze focused ‘somewhere south of Macquarie Island.’ The gallery was ‘fractious’, but no one was thrown out. It took Marr months, he says, to realise how ‘baffled’ Pell was that afternoon in May. Yes, he admitted the worst. The Church had hidden abuses. Yes, this facilitated ‘appalling crimes.’ Yes, children’s lives have been wrecked. He apologised again and again. Yet despite everything, says Marr summing up, Pell will guard the Church with his life: ‘Nations come and go but the Church remains. What is this brief scandal compared to the history of saints and martyrs and mighty Popes he first heard of so long ago in his mother’s kitchen in Ballarat?’ The Church survives ‘unchanged and unbowed.’

But even after his months of reflection, Marr does not come close to understanding Pell’s faith (or, it seems to me, anyone’s). At the end, as in his other biographical essays, Marr takes us to what he sees as the heart of the matter. Kevin Rudd is driven by impatient rage, Tony Abbott by animal calculation. But Pell is entirely different: ‘As I read the man, listen to him and watch him in action, I wonder how much of the strange ordinariness of George Pell began fifty years ago when a robust schoolboy decided, as an act of heroic piety, to kill sex in himself.’ What does he have in return for this sacrifice? ‘He has the consolations of friendship, music and a good cellar…’ So there we have it. The Good News from Christ on the Cross: ‘Get a good cellar!’

It is your civic duty,’ Tony Abbott admonished Heather Henderson, daughter of Sir Robert Menzies. He meant she should write her reminiscences to follow up the success of her earlier Letters to my Daughter, a selection of her father’s letters to her. She has now written them — A Smile for My Parents. It takes us back to the days when the prime minister’s wife often did the cooking in the Lodge, and when there were chooks, sometimes headless, in the back yard. (Chicken was for special occasions). Neighbours popped in. There was a fuel stove in the kitchen and a copper in the washhouse. It ends with her mother’s death at 96 when a mad London obituary ‘reported’ that Sir William McMahon blamed her mother for Menzies’ distrust of him because she resented his failure to marry Heather! (‘It’s hard to type that without exploding’.)

I particularly enjoyed Menzies’ spoof Sydney Morning Herald ‘obituary’ of himself written in 1960 at a time of growing Fairfax hostility. It dismisses his first period as prime minister (1939 to 1941) as ‘a spurious façade’. True, he reintroduced compulsory military training, raised the second A.I.F., created a munitions organisation, visited our troops in the Middle East as far west as Benghazi, toured Great Britain during the Battle for Britain, and visited the United States where he urged the impossibility of neutrality. But all this only concealed the man’s ‘natural indolence’. His frivolity became obvious to all when, during the war, he found time to open an exhibition of ‘purely representational art!’ As for his years as Leader of the Opposition (1943 to 1949), it’s true he managed to amalgamate 14 scattered groups into one Liberal party, endow it with a coherent policy, secure a Coalition with the Country party, and sweep ‘our friends in the Labor party out of office.’ But all this was entirely ‘meretricious’. The real test was when he became prime minister again in 1949. He was a complete failure. He clung to ‘an atavistic belief’ that political power belongs to persons elected by the public and not to newspaper proprietors. Now that ‘the shoddy magic of his vulgar eloquence’ has gone, the electorate will turn once more to the Fairfax press for ‘guided freedom.’ Sound familiar?