Cardinal charged with sex offences
Pell has also faced allegations he mishandled cases of abuse of clergy when archbishop
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA— Australian police charged a top Vatican cardinal on Thursday with multiple counts of historical sexual assault offences, a move certain to rock the highest levels of the Holy See.
Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’ chief financial adviser and Australia’s most senior Catholic, is the highestranking Vatican official to ever be charged in the church’s long-running sexual abuse scandal.
Victoria state police deputy commissioner Shane Patton said police have summonsed Pell to appear in an Australian court to face multiple charges of “historical sexual assault offences,” meaning offences that generally occurred some time ago. Patton said there are multiple complainants against Pell, but gave no other details on the allegations against the cardinal.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney issued a statement on behalf of Pell, saying the 76-year-old cardinal “strenuously denied all allegations” and would return to Australia to clear his name.
The charges are a new and serious blow to Pope Francis, who has already suffered several credibility setbacks in his promised “zero tolerance” policy about sex abuse.
For years, Pell has faced allegations that he mishandled cases of clergy abuse when he was archbishop of Melbourne and, later, Sydney.
His actions as archbishop came under scrutiny in recent years by an investigation into how the Catholic Church and other institutions have responded to the sexual abuse of children.
Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has found shocking levels of abuse in Australia’s Catholic Church, revealing earlier this year that 7 per cent of Catholic priests were accused of sexually abusing children over several decades.
Last year, Pell said during his testimony to the commission that the Catholic Church had made “enormous mistakes” in allowing thousands of children to be raped and molested by priests over centuries.
He conceded that he, too, had erred by often believing priests over victims who alleged abuse. And he vowed to help end a rash of suicides that has plagued church abuse victims in his Australian hometown of Ballarat.
But more recently, Pell himself became the focus of a clergy sex abuse investigation, with Victoria detectives flying to the Vatican last year to interview the cardinal.
It is unclear what allegations the charges announced Thursday relate to, but two men, now in their 40s, have said that Pell touched them inappropriately at a swimming pool in the late 1970s, when Pell was a senior priest in Melbourne.
When Francis was asked last year about the accusations against Pell, he said he wanted to wait for Australian justice to take its course before judging.
“Once justice has spoken, I will speak,” he said at the time.