Cardinal George Pell died at age 81 in Rome, Italy, in January 2023. He was in my mind a man of honour and virtue, a man whom I believe suffered under false accusations leading to an unjust prison sentence. This sentence was later cut short through his appeal to the High Court of Australia. Going back to the beginning of his legal woes, allegations had been brought against Cardinal Pell so that he appeared in three courts in Australia between 2018 and 2020. He started serving his six-year sentence in March 2019 after having been convicted of five child sex abuse offences. His convictions were first decided by the jury of the County Court of Victoria, Melbourne, in December 2018. His later appeal to the Supreme Court of Victoria, the Court of Appeal, ended with his conviction upheld by two out of three of its judges in August 2019. The third dissenting judge’s decision was that taken by 7 out of 7 judges of the High Court of Australia in April 2020 when they overturned Cardinal Pell’s earlier convictions, allowing his release from prison after having served his sentence for over a year.
From what I could guage by media reports, Cardinal Pell remained calm and unretaliatory throughout his trials and imprisonment. He was liked by many of his fellow prisoners probably out of his genuine concern for them. But how did it all come to this in the first place? How did a man of honour and virtue like Cardinal Pell end up in prison for what I believe were false charges all along?
Although there have been some bad actors in the Catholic and other Churches guilty of sexual abuse of minors, why was innocent Cardinal Pell singled out as a public target? Around the time of allegations of sexual offences by his alleged victim in Australia, Cardinal Pell was in Rome, appointed by Pope Francis to investigate the money trail of large sums of missing Vatican funds. Funny coincidence? I don’t think so. There is a feasible theory that another cardinal, one later charged with embezzlement, may have strategised the downfall of Cardinal Pell. A deliberate strategy of creating trouble for him elsewhere would get Cardinal Pell away from continuing his audit of Vatican financial records. It has been suggested that the alleged victim of Cardinal Pell had been bribed to bring charges against Cardinal Pell who was Archbishop at the time of the alleged offences.
Upon the Cardinal’s release from prison, he eventually returned to Rome. Cardinal’s Pell’s death is shrouded in mystery… or should be. He ostensibly died from complications as he came out of anaesthesia following a hip replacement operation but he actually died 9 hours after the operation was over making the complications from anaesthesia story unlikely. Whatever happened to Cardinal Pell in his death, I as a Protestant pay tribute to a Catholic man of integrity and a man who seemed to convey a sense of the kindness and goodness of God.
