A SERIOUS INJUSTICE
Cardinal speaks out after sex abuse convictions are quashed
CARDINAL George Pell has welcomed Australia’s highest court clearing him of child sex crimes and said his trial had not been a referendum on the Catholic Church’s handling of the clergy abuse crisis.
Pope Francis’ former finance minister had been the most senior Catholic found guilty of sexually abusing children and spent 13 months in prison before seven High Court judges unanimously dismissed his convictions.
The cardinal said in his first public statement since he was convicted in December 2018: “I have consistently maintained my innocence while suffering from a serious injustice.
“I hold no ill will toward my accuser”, a former choirboy whose evidence was at the core of the 78-year-old cleric’s prosecution.
Doubt
The High Court found there was reasonable doubt surrounding the evidence of the witness, now the father of a young family aged in his 30s, who said the then archbishop had abused him and another 13-year-old choirboy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in the late 1990s.
Mr Pell added: “My trial wasn’t a referendum on the Catholic Church, nor a referendum on how Church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of paedophilia in the Church.
“The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes – and I did not.”
A judge and lawyers had urged two juries in 2018 to try the cardinal on the evidence and not on his senior position in the church’s flawed responses to clergy abuse in Australia.
The first trial ended in a jury deadlock and the second unanimously convicted him on all charges.
The Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests said in a statement they were “dismayed and heartbroken” by the decision.
Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher called for the ruling to end the pursuit of the cardinal in the courts, adding: “I am pleased that the cardinal will now be released and I ask that the pursuit of him that brought us to this point now cease.”
The cardinal had been serving a six-year sentence after he was convicted of sexually assaulting the two boys in 1996 and 1997.