George Pell guilty: Vatican treasurer convicted of child sexual assault by Australian court

The most senior Catholic cleric ever charged with child sex abuse has been convicted of molesting two choirboys moments after celebrating mass, dealing a new blow to the Catholic hierarchy’s credibility after a year of global revelations of abuse and coverup.

Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’s top financial adviser and the Vatican’s economy minister, bowed his head but then regained his composure as the 12-member jury delivered unanimous verdicts in the County Court of Victoria, Australia, on 11 December after more than two days of deliberation.

The court had until Tuesday forbidden publication of any details about the trial.

Pell faces a potential maximum 50-year prison term after a sentencing hearing that begins on Wednesday. He has foreshadowed an appeal.

The revelations came in the same month that the Vatican announced that the pontiff had approved the expulsion from the priesthood of a former high-ranking American cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, for sexual abuse of minors and adults.

The convictions were also confirmed days after Pope Francis concluded his extraordinary summit of Catholic leaders summoned to Rome for a tutorial on preventing sexual abuse by the clergy and protecting children from predatory priests.

The jury convicted Pell of abusing two 13-year-old boys whom he had caught drinking sacramental wine in a rear room of Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in late 1996, as hundreds of worshippers were streaming out of Sunday services.

Pell, now 77 but aged 55 at the time, had just been named the most senior Catholic in Australia’s second-largest city.

The jury also found Pell guilty of indecently assaulting one of the boys in a corridor more than a month later.

Pell had maintained his innocence throughout, describing the accusations as “vile and disgusting conduct” that went against everything he believed in.

His lawyer had told the jury that only a “madman” would take the risk of abusing boys in such a public place.

Both he and chief judge Peter Kidd urged the jury of eight men and four women not to punish Pell for all the failings of the Catholic church, which in Australia have been staggering.

“You must not scapegoat Cardinal Pell,” Mr Kidd told the jury.

Along with Ireland and the US, Australia has been devastated by the impact of the clerical abuse scandal, with a royal commission finding that 4,444 people reported they had been abused at more than 1,000 Catholic institutions across Australia between 1980 and 2015.

Pell’s own hometown of Ballarat had such a high incidence of abuse – and, survivors say, a correlated higher-than-average incidence of suicide – that the city warranted its own case study in the royal commission’s report.

The conviction capped a year that had been so dominated by revelations of high-ranking sex abuse and coverups that analysts openly speak of a crisis unparalleled since the Reformation. In addition to Pell, the allegations against Mr McCarrick of groping a minor in the 1970s and of sleeping with adult seminarians became public.

As a result of the scandal, Pope Francis’s approval ratings have tanked in the US, and his standing with conservative Catholics around the world – already on shaky ground over his outreach to divorcees – has plunged.

Up until the verdict, Pell’s lawyers had appeared confident that they had established a reasonable doubt and had expected quick verdicts of not guilty.

When the jury chairman delivered the first guilty verdict, Pell’s hands slipped from the arm rests of the chair where he sat in the dock at the back of the courtroom. His head bowed after the second verdict, but he restored his composure for the final verdicts.

Pell, who walked to and from court throughout his month-long trial with a crutch under his right arm, was released on bail to undergo surgical knee replacements in Sydney on 14 December. Prosecutor Mark Gibson did not oppose bail, saying the surgery would be more easily managed outside the prison system.

The first four offences occurred at the first or second solemn mass that Pell celebrated as leader of the century-old cathedral in the centre of Melbourne.

“I was young and I didn’t really know what had happened to me. I didn’t really know what it was, if it was normal,” one of the complainants told the court.

The other victim died of a heroin overdose in 2014 without ever complaining of the abuse, and even denying to his suspicious mother that he had been molested while he was part of the choir.

Neither victim can now be identified.

Pell was initially charged with orally raping the second boy. But that charge was downgraded to indecent assault when the complainant testified that from his vantage point he couldn’t see what happened.

More than a month later, the complainant testified that Pell assaulted him in a corridor after a mass.

“I didn’t tell anyone at the time because I didn’t want to jeopardise anything. I didn’t want to rock the boat with my family, my schooling, my life,” the complainant told the jurors.

The complainant testified that he feared that making such accusations against a powerful church man would cost him his place in the choir and with it his scholarship to prestigious St Kevin’s College.

Pell pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and four counts of willfully committing an indecent act with or in the presence of a child under 16 in late 1996 and early 1997.

He did not testify at his trial. But the jury saw a video recording of an interview he gave Australian detectives in Rome in 2016 in which he stridently denied the allegations.

Pell grimaced, appearing incredulous and distressed, waved his arms over his head and muttered to himself as the detectives detailed the accusations that his victim had levelled against him a year earlier.

“The allegations involve vile and disgusting conduct contrary to everything I hold dear and contrary to the explicit teachings of the church which I have spent my life representing,” Pell told police.

Pell’s lawyer told the jury that the prosecution case compounded a series of improbabilities and impossibilities.

He told the jury that Pell could not have parted his robes as the complainant had described.

The jury was handed the actual cumbersome robes Pell wore as archbishop. Over his regular clothes, Pell would wear a full-length white robe called an alb that was tied around his waist with a rope-like cincture. Over that, he would drape a 3m band of cloth called a stole around his neck. The outermost garment was the long poncho-like chasuble.

More than 20 witnesses, including clerics, choristers and altar servers, testified during the trial. None recalled ever seeing the complainant and the other victim break from a procession of choristers, altar servers and clerics to go to the back room.

The complainant testified that he and his friend had run from the procession and back into the cathedral through a side door to, as Mr Gibson, the prosecutor, said, “have some fun”.

Monsignor Charles Portelli, who was the cathedral’s master of ceremonies in the 1990s, testified that he was always with Pell after mass to help him disrobe in the sacristy.

The defence argued that Pell’s usual practice was to linger at the cathedral front steps talking to members of the congregation after mass. But Mr Gibson said there was evidence that Pell didn’t always chat outside and had the opportunity to commit the crimes.

The lifting of the gag order comes after Pope Francis charted a new course for the Catholic church to confront clergy sexual abuse and coverups, a scandal that has consumed his papacy and threatens the credibility of the Catholic hierarchy at large.

Opening a first-ever Vatican summit on preventing abuse, Pope Francis warned 190 bishops and religious superiors last week that their flocks were demanding concrete action, not just words, to punish predator priests and keep children safe. He offered them 21 proposals to consider going forward, some of them obvious and easy to adopt, others requiring new laws.

But Pope Francis went into the meeting even more weakened and discredited after one of his top advisers was convicted of the very crime he has now decided is worth fighting on a universal scale.

Pell’s downfall will invariably tarnish the pope, since Pope Francis appointed Pell economy minister in 2014 even though some of the allegations against him were known at the time.

In October, Pope Francis finally cut Pell loose, removing him as a member of his informal cabinet. Pell technically remains prefect of the Vatican’s economy ministry, but his five-year term expires this year and is not expected to be renewed.

Associated Press