Cardinal George Pell, a conservative theologian who served as Pope Francis’ Vatican finance chief, and who was acquitted after becoming the most senior Catholic cleric to be convicted of sexually assaulting children, died Tuesday in Rome. He was 81.
His death was confirmed by Peter Comensoli, one of his succesors as Melbourne archbishop, who said the cardinal died of heart complications after undergoing hip surgery. Cardinal Pell had been in Rome to attend Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s funeral last week.
Cardinal George Pell is interviewed in 2020 in Sydney following his release from prison after Australia’s highest court cleared him of child sex crimes. Sky News Australia via AP
Cardinal Pell spent more than a year in solitary confinement in his native Australia after a jury found him guilty in 2018 of assaulting two teenage choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral while he was the city’s archbishop in the 1990s. His conviction was overturned by a top Australian court in 2020.
The cardinal remained a polarizing figure in Australia and the church even after his acquittal. For his detractors, he was a symbol of the abuse crisis. To his supporters, he was a scapegoat who had been targeted by enemies of the church.
Cardinal Pell, who also served as archbishop of Sydney, set up one of the world’s first programs to compensate victims of child sexual abuse. But critics say he presided over a culture of secrecy, using the program – which required victims to waive their right to civil legal action – to silence them.
A top-level Australian inquiry, known as a Royal Commission, began probing child sex abuse in the Catholic Church and other institutions in 2013. It found that the cardinal was aware of clergy molesting children in the 1970s but didn’t take sufficient steps to address it.
The cardinal told the inquiry in 2016 that he did not know whether the offenses of Gerald Ridsdale – a priest who was moved from parish to parish by the church in the 1970s and 1980s, and later convicted on dozens of charges of sexually abusing children – was common knowledge.
“It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me,” Cardinal Pell told the inquiry. “The suffering, of course, was real and I very much regret that, but I had no reason to turn my mind to the extent of the evils that Ridsdale had perpetrated.”
Cardinal Pell gave evidence to the inquiry via video link from Rome, after his lawyers said that he was too unwell to travel to Australia. Pell suffered from hypertension, heart disease and cardiac dysfunction, and a doctor had concluded that a prolonged flight was dangerous to his health.
A staunch conservative on the church’s moral teachings, the cardinal was an ally of Benedict and Francis when they led the church. He was recruited to the Vatican by Pope Francis in 2014 and charged with reforming its finances. His career was effectively upturned when he returned to Australia in 2017 to defend himself against allegations of sexual assault.
In the trial, the prosecution relied on the evidence of a former choirboy, who was then in his 30s and had a young family. He reported the alleged abuses to police in 2015, after another ex-choirboy died of an accidental drug overdose. The other choirboy did not make public accusations against Cardinal Pell. (A separate case of sexual abuse was dropped by the prosecution after the trial began.)
Cardinal Pell’s accuser, whose name was not publicly disclosed, said he respected the decision’s decision to acquit and accepted the outcome. He said it highlighted the difficulties in child sexual abuse cases of satisfying a criminal court that the offense occurred beyond all reasonable doubt.
“It is a very high standard to meet – a heavy burden,” he said in a statement at the time. “But the price we pay for weighting the system in favor of the accused is that many sexual offenses against children go unpunished.”
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