Cardinal George Pell acquitted of pedophilia died at 81
2023.01.11 00:41
Cardinal George Pell acquitted of pedophilia died at 81
By Kristina Sobol
Budrigannews.com – According to his private secretary, Australian Cardinal George Pell, a prominent Roman Catholic conservative and former high Vatican official who was cleared of sexual abuse allegations in 2020, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 81.
Fr. According to Joseph Hamilton, Pell passed away on Tuesday night in a Rome hospital. According to Melbourne Archbishop Peter Comensoli, Pell passed away following hip surgery from heart complications.
In 2020, a ruling by an Australian appeals court overturned convictions for Pell for sexually assaulting two choir boys in the 1990s.
After serving 13 months in prison, the ruling allowed Pell to walk free, putting an end to the case of the most senior person accused in the worldwide scandal of historical sex abuse that has shaken the Roman Catholic Church.
Pell, a former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, was the economy minister for the Vatican from 2014 until 2017, when he took a leave of absence to return to Australia to face the charges.
Pell was a polarizing figure during the two decades that he ruled the Australian Catholic hierarchy. He was adored by conservative Catholics but despised by liberals for his staunch opposition to same-sex marriage and women’s ordination. This was even before the allegations of sexual assault were made against him.
Since his acquittal, he had resided in Rome and met with Pope Francis multiple times. After Pell returned, Francis publicly praised him for his frequent attendance at the pontiff’s Masses.
Francis celebrated his morning Mass in 2020 on the day that Pell was found not guilty. He compared the suffering of those who are subjected to unfair punishments to that of Jesus.
Even though he was retired, Pell became a well-known figure in the Vatican area upon his return to Rome. Conservatives preparing their platform for the eventual election of Francis’s successor used his house as a focal point.
The late former Pope Benedict was a close friend of his. However, he argued that the faithful had been misled by Benedict’s decision to continue wearing white, and he disagreed with that. Following his return to Rome, he stated in an interview with Reuters that the Church required guidelines regarding the duties of retired popes.
Pell was committed to stand trial in May 2018 on multiple charges of alleged sexual offenses that occurred in the 1970s at a pool in his hometown of Ballarat and in the 1990s at Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Due to a judge’s refusal to accept certain evidence, the so-called swimmers case was dropped.
In two trials, Pell, who denied the allegations, did not testify; the first trial ended with a hung jury.
During the retrial, he was found guilty on all five counts of assaulting two teenage choirboys at the cathedral while he was archbishop of Melbourne. He was given a six-year prison sentence.
He lost his first appeal and spent 404 days in isolation before Australia’s seven High Court judges unanimously overturned his conviction on the grounds that it was not established beyond a reasonable doubt.
“I don’t want to overstate how difficult that was, but it was bad and not like a vacation. But there were a lot of bad times,” Pell told Reuters about his time in jail.
The high-profile case was one of Australia’s most contentious, and some media outlets broke a suppression order that said they couldn’t cover the trial.
According to Clare Leaney, chief executive officer of the In Good Faith Foundation, which supports survivors of institutional abuse, Pell served as a symbol for a system that prioritized the interests of the Catholic Church over the interests and safety of individuals for many survivors.
“We anticipate a spike in individuals coming forward to disclose their first-time experiences of institutional abuse as a result of this news.”
Tony Abbott, a former prime minister of Australia, stated that the Church had lost a great leader and that Australia had lost a great son.
“It was a modern form of crucifixion for him to be imprisoned on charges that the High Court ultimately scathingly dismissed; “Reputationally at the very least a kind of living death,” Abbott wrote on Twitter. His prison diaries ought to be a classic: a fine man struggling with a cruel fate and attempting to reconcile his suffering’s unfairness.”
On behalf of the father of a former altar boy who claimed to have been sexually abused by Pell, Shine Lawyers stated that it would continue a civil lawsuit against the church and the estate of Pell.
Pell was a gifted student and athlete as the son of an Anglican gold miner and an Irish Catholic mother. He signed a contract to play professional Australian Rules football when he was 18 and also played for a club in the reserves, but he later decided to go to seminary.
After graduating from Oxford with a doctorate in church history, he became a parish priest in Ballarat.
Pell rose to prominence in the middle of the 1990s, first as archbishop of Melbourne, and then as archbishop of Sydney in 2001. He is a hefty and imposing figure who stands at 6 feet 3 inches (1.9 meters).
Throughout the 1990s, the church came under increasing fire for not supporting victims and protecting priests and other church members who had committed sexual offenses.
Pell was proud to have established one of the first programs in the world to compensate child sexual abuse victims in Melbourne.
However, critics later informed a government-appointed inquiry that the scheme was intended to discourage victims from taking legal action.
The extensive investigation revealed that the church and other institutions’ cultures of secrecy and cover-ups had repeatedly failed to protect children. It also found that Pell knew about at least two priests abusing children in the 1970s and 1980s but didn’t do anything to get rid of them.
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