Cleared, cardinal jailed over abuse of two choirboys
THE most senior Roman Catholic jailed for child abuse walked free yesterday after Australia’s highest court quashed his conviction.
Cardinal George Pell – one of Pope Francis’s most senior advisers – was cleared amid doubts he could have sexually assaulted two choirboys due to the heavy robes he was wearing.
The Vatican’s former treasurer, 78, had served 13 months of a six-year sentence in a case which rocked the Church around the world. There is speculation the cleric could now return to Rome’s inner sanctums.
After Cardinal Pell was freed yesterday afternoon, he insisted he held ‘no ill will’ towards his accusers.
He said: ‘I do not want my acquittal to add to the hurt and bitterness so many feel, there is certainly hurt and bitterness enough.’ He had always denied assaulting the teenage boys in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996.
He insisted his multi-layered robes made the two acts he was accused of impossible. Detailed evidence about Cardinal Pell’s garments played a part in seven judges at the High Court in Brisbane agreeing he had been wrongfully convicted in 2018.
It was the cleric’s final legal challenge after his conviction was upheld by a lower court last year. Judges said this earlier appeal hearing ‘failed to engage with the question of whether there remained a reasonable possibility the offending had not taken place’.
One of the accusers has since died and the remaining one alleged the cardinal – an archbishop at the time – had caught him and his friend drinking altar wine and told them, ‘You’re in trouble’.
The witness claimed: ‘He undid his trousers or his belt, like he started moving underneath his robes.’
Cardinal Pell’s trial barrister, Robert Richter QC, called the claims fantasy and said the thick robes would have prevented access to his genitals. The cleric was the Vatican’s
‘Polarising leader’
third-highest ranking official when he voluntarily returned to Melbourne in July 2017 determined to clear his name.
The former archbishop of Sydney has been described as ‘maybe the most polarising religious leader in Australia’s history’.
He is said to be adored by followers but is seen as a brutal hardliner by critics who accused him of ‘old-fashioned authoritarianism’.
Several inmates at Victoria’s Barwon Prison are said to have cheered Cardinal Pell as he left his cell yesterday. He spent last night at a monastery in Melbourne, which received a wine delivery shortly after his arrival.
In a statement, the Vatican said it ‘welcomes the High Court’s unanimous decision’.