Cardinal may face two trials

TOP Pope aide Cardinal George Pell could face two separate trials as he fights to clear his name over historic sexual offence allegations, an Australian court heard yesterday.

A Melbourne judge on Tuesday ordered the Vatican finance chief (76) to stand trial on multiple charges, making him the highest-ranked Catholic to face such allegations.

Mr Pell pleaded not guilty, and half of the charges initially filed against him were thrown out.

The exact details and nature of the alleged offences remain confidential, other than they involve “multiple charges and multiple complainants”, and that they date from the 1970s and 1990s. Some of the alleged offences were at a swimming pool in the town of Ballarat in Victoria state where Mr Pell was a priest in the 1970s, and a second set of alleged actions was at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in the 1990s.

Split

At yesterday’s brief directions hearing in the Victoria County Court, Mr Pell’s barrister Robert Richter argued that because the charges related to different locations and were 20 years apart, they should be split and heard in two trials. Another court hearing was set for May 16 when final decisions and trial dates are expected to be set.

Mr Pell, who entered the court surrounded by a police cordon, is on bail and has had his passport confiscated.

The former Sydney and Melbourne archbishop has been on leave from the Vatican, returning to Australia to fight the allegations, the most serious of which have been dismissed due to inconsistencies in the evidence.

Mr Pell was one of Pope Francis’s most trusted aides, handpicked by him in 2014 to make the Church’s finances more transparent.

It cemented a meteoric rise by the Australian, who was Archbishop of Melbourne and then Sydney before being named to the Vatican’s powerful College of Cardinals at the behest of Pope John Paul II in 2003. (© Daily Telegraph, London)