Pell to face sex charges

George Pell will be the most senior Catholic leader to face a jury after being committed to stand trial on multiple historic sexual assault charges.

In a decision that will ring loud through the Vatican and around the religious world, Australia’s most senior Catholic and the man who a year ago oversaw management of the Vatican’s finances was yesterday committed to stand trial on half the charges he faced, involving multiple accusers.

However, magistrate Belinda Wallington struck out a series of serious charges at the start of her ruling.

Wallington committed the 76-year-old on charges against multiple complainants, involving alleged sexual offending at a swimming pool in the 1970s in Ballarat, where the accused man was then working as a priest; and at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1990s, when he was the then Archbishop of Melbourne.

Asked to enter a plea, Pell said in a loud, clear voice: ‘‘Not guilty.’’

Wallington took more than an hour to read through her decisions on the respective sets of charges, and the first ruling she made was to strike out the most serious of allegations. They involved alleged offending at a Ballarat cinema during a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and allegations of other offending throughout Ballarat over the following year.

But Wallington said inconsistencies in the evidence of the complainant who claimed he was sexually assaulted in the cinema and throughout Ballarat, and the timelines of when the movie was screened, combined with the accounts of family members, meant there was insufficient evidence for him to stand trial.

The magistrate ruled the evidence of the other accusers was credible enough to be believed by a jury, that there was no evidence accusers had colluded in what they told police, and that their allegations were not contaminated by media reports, most notably a television interview on the ABC’s 7.30 program.

- Fairfax