Australian Cardinal George Pell, whose child sexual abuse convictions were quashed, dies at 81

Australian Cardinal George Pell, a Catholic conservative and former top Vatican official who in 2020 was acquitted of sexual abuse allegations, died on Tuesday at the age of 81, his private secretary said.

Father Joseph Hamilton told Reuters that Pell died in Rome on Tuesday night. He said the archdiocese of Sydney would issue a statement later.

Archbishop Peter Comensoli, the archbishop of Melbourne, said Pell died of heart complications following hip surgery.

“Cardinal Pell is an important and influential Church leader, both in Australia and internationally, deeply committed to Christian discipleship,” he said in a statement on Facebook.

In 2020, an Australian appeals court overturned Pell’s 2018 conviction for assaulting two choir boys in the 1990s.

The verdict allowed Pell, now 78, to go free after 13 months in prison, ending the case of the most senior figure accused in a global scandal over historic sex abuse that has rocked the Catholic Church around the world.

Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, served as the Vatican’s economy minister from 2014 until he took a leave of absence in 2017 to return to Australia to face the allegations.

He has lived in Rome since his release in 2020. Pell often attended Papal Masses and Francis praised him publicly after his return.

A polarizing figure in the church

Even before the sexual allegations, Pell was a polarizing figure in the two decades that dominated the Australian Catholic hierarchy, respected by conservative Catholics but scorned by liberals for his staunch opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and women’s ordination.

In May 2018, Pell decided to stand trial on multiple historical sexual misconduct charges related to alleged incidents at a swimming pool in his hometown of Ballarat in the 1970s and at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in the 1990s. The swimmers’ case was thrown out after a judge disallowed certain evidence.

Returning from Rome where he had been tasked with cleaning up the Vatican’s finances, Pell denied the charges but did not stop at two trials, the first of which ended with a hung jury. At a retrial, a jury unanimously convicted him on five charges of assaulting two teenage choirs at a cathedral when he was archbishop of Melbourne.

Pell was sentenced to six years in prison, becoming the most senior Catholic official in the world to be jailed for sexually assaulting a child. He lost the first appeal and was in solitary confinement for 404 days until seven judges of the High Court of Australia unanimously overturned the conviction, saying it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

The former choirboy who accused Pell in court and is known as Witness J said he understands that it is difficult to satisfy the criminal court beyond the shadow of a doubt that child sexual abuse occurred. Another former choirboy died before Pell was charged.

Multiple controversies

The son of an Anglican gold miner and a devout Irish Catholic mother, Pell was both academically and athletically gifted. At 18, he secured a contract to play professional Australian Rules football and played in the club’s reserves, but later opted to enter a seminary.

He later earned a doctorate in church history from Oxford and then became a parish priest in Ballarat.

A stout and imposing figure at 1.9 meters tall, Pell rose to prominence in the mid-1990s as archbishop of Melbourne, then archbishop of Sydney in 2001.

In the 1990s, the church came under increasing attack for protecting priests and other church personnel who had committed sexual offenses and for not supporting their victims.

Pell is proud to have set up one of the world’s first schemes to compensate child sex victims in Melbourne. However, critics later told a government-appointed inquiry that the scheme was designed to dissuade victims from pursuing legal action.

The investigation, known as the Royal Commission, began in 2013 a five-year investigation into the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church and other institutions.

He found churches and other institutions have repeatedly failed to protect children with a culture of secrecy and cover-up. It also found that Pell knew about the sexual abuse of children by at least two priests in the 1970s and 1980s and failed to take steps to exonerate the priests.

The commission also said Pell should investigate why Gerard Ridsdale, a priest later convicted of more than 130 counts of child sexual abuse, was moved from parish to parish in the 1970s and 1980s.

Pell told the commission he had no knowledge of Ridsdale’s offenses until he was charged in 1993.

“It’s a sad story and it doesn’t appeal to me,” he said.