Protesters planning ‘Pell go to Hell’ march at funeral
Mourners paid their respects to Cardinal George Pell who lay in state in a Sydney cathedral yesterday as police sought a court order to prevent protesters from disrupting his funeral.
Pell, who was once the thirdhighest ranking cleric in the Vatican and spent more than a year in prison before his child abuse convictions were overturned in 2020, died in Rome on January 10 aged 81.
The staunchly conservative church leader will lie in St Mary’s Cathedral until he is interred at the cathedral crypt after a funeral Mass today.
Police have rejected an application due to safety concerns from Sydneybased gay rights group Community Action for Rainbow Rights for a permit to protest outside the cathedral.
Police applied to the New South Wales Supreme Court yesterday to prohibit the rally.
Deputy Commissioner David Hudson said police couldn’t reach a compromise with organisers’
protest plans.
“New South Wales Police is not opposed to the topic that the protesters wish to air.
“We certainly respect the right of people to be able to protest and air their voices,” said Hudson.
But a “number of aspects” of the planned protest “present a risk to public safety”, Hudson said.
Justice Peter Garling adjourned the hearing to allow further negotiations between police and activists over the proposed protest route.
The gay rights group called for
people to join what it calls its “Pell go to Hell!” protest.
“We can’t let the police get away
with denying us our right to protest this bigot’s funeral!” the group said.
Pell was an outspoken and polarising figure throughout his church career and remains divisive in his native Australia in death.
Pell was archbishop of Sydney from 2001 until 2014 when Pope Francis appointed him to be the first prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy tasked with reforming the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances.
Pell had been archbishop of Melbourne from 1996 to 2001, a period during which he was alleged to have sexually abused two choirboys in St Patrick’s Cathedral.
He was convicted then acquitted after a second appeal.
A national inquiry into institutional responses to child sex abuse found in 2017 that Pell knew of clergy molesting children in the 1970s and did not take adequate action to address it. —AP