George Pell flew higher than any Australian priest but he chose career over the safety of children

He was a company man. He did what he did to preserve the power and the assets of the church. If that meant thrashing victims of abuse through the courts and boxing them into tiny settlements, that was fine by him. Duty done.

That’s what made him the right man to clean up the financial mess of the Vatican. High among the achievements for which he deserves praise at this time was the work he and his accountants did to begin tracking the missing billions in the Holy City. Alas, Pope Francis didn’t have the guts to back him. The courtiers brought him down.

Soon after, he was in Melbourne facing a long purgatory in the criminal courts which ended in a dramatic, unanimous acquittal by the high court. By that time, the so-called swimming pool charges had evaporated despite being aired by victims, once again, in Sarah Ferguson’s fine 2020 ABC television series Revelation.

No Australian priest has ever climbed as high as George Pell. Few figures in the Catholic world have crashed so low. Pell was 56 years a priest; 18 years an archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney; a cardinal for 20 years and a prisoner in Victorian jails for one.

He emerged with some grace. A martyr, his followers say, to the secular powers besieging the church. High on their list of his tormentors are police, prosecutors and the press. Senior priests who had once been wary of him began to speak of Pell with warmth. His acquittal will be celebrated by them all over again in the next few weeks as a victory for the church.

This promising footballer from Ballarat was recruited to his mission in the 1950s by that mighty Catholic warrior Bob Santamaria. Pell had brains. He was probably right when he boasted he was the first Catholic priest since the Reformation to be given a doctorate at Oxford.

His apprentice years were spent back in Ballarat. Child abuse was rife in the diocese. The bishop knew and did nothing. Children told Pell a priest was abusing their classmates. He did not investigate. He sat on a committee that gave the contemptible Gerard Ridsdale a fresh parish. Years later, he claimed not to know – as others did – that Ridsdale was an unrepentant, compulsive abuser.

Timeline George Pell timeline Show

1941

Born in Ballarat, Victoria.

1960

Begins studying for the priesthood at Corpus Christi Colleage in Werribee.

1963

Continues studies at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome.

1966

Ordained a Catholic priest in the Vatican.

1972

Returns to Ballarat as an assistant parish priest.

1996

Appointed archbishop of Melbourne by Pope John Paul II.

2001

Appointed archbishop of Sydney by Pope John Paul II.

2003

Pope John Paul II makes Pell one of 31 new cardinals.

2005

Takes part in papal conclave that selects Pope Benedict XVI. Pell is also appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia.

2012

The Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, announces the royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse.

2013

Pell takes part in the papal conclave that elects Pope Francis.

2013

Gives evidence to Victorian parliamentary inquiry into handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations in Melbourne.

2014

Pell is appointed the prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, making him effectively the Vatican’s treasurer and widely reported to be the third most senior figure in the church hierarchy. He is said to be a possible future pope.

March 2014

Gives evidence to royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in Sydney.

August 2014

Second royal commission appearance via videolink from the Vatican, to Melbourne hearing on the Melbourne Response.

February 2016 – March 2016

Third royal commission appearance, via videolink from Rome hotel conference room to Sydney; hearing on church’s handling of child abuse allegations in Ballarat diocese and Melbourne archdiocese.

29 June 2017

Charged with multiple, historical child sex offences. Pell strongly denies the allegations.

January 2018

One of the key complainants against Pell dies.

15 August 2018

The first of two trials into the allegations begins. It cannot be reported owing to a suppression order.

20 September 2018

Jury unable to reach either a unanimous or majority verdict. A mistrial is declared.

11 December 2018

The jury at retrial returns a unanimous verdict of guilty on all five charges after less than four days of deliberation. The suppression order means this can not be reported until the second trial is complete.

13 December 2018

Pope Francis removes Pell from his inner circle in a restructure of his Council of Cardinals. Pell still holds his treasury position, from which he stood aside to stand trial.

26 February 2019

Prosecutors announce they have dropped the second trial owing to a lack of evidence, and because one of Pell’s key accusers died in January 2018. The judge lifts the suppression order on the first trial.

13 March 2019

Pell is sentenced to six years prison with a non-parole period of three years and eight months.

5 June 2019 – 6 June 2019

Pell’s appeal is heard by the appellate division of the supreme court of Victoria.

21 August 2019

Pell’s appeal is dismissed by a majority of two to one.

17 September 2019

Lawyers for Pell lodge a special leave application with the high court.

7 April 2020

The high court quashes Cardinal George Pell’s convictions, unanimously allowing his appeal. This is the conclusion of the legal process in Australia. There will be no further trials. Pell walks free after more than 400 days in prison.

10 January 2023

Cardinal George Pell dies aged 81.

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Pell made an early choice between children and career. That choice faced many ambitious priests at the time. The Rome of John Paul II was not willing to face the shame of child abuse. A lone vigilante protecting kids on the far side of the world might end his days in a seaside parish, but not wearing a cardinal’s hat.

Swimming was his pastime. He loved to romp with kids in the Ballarat pool. Hot afternoons saw him in the shallow end tossing eight-year-olds in the air. One day an official at Torquay who didn’t know who Pell was told him to piss off from the changing rooms and not come back.

Pell was in his forties when he took the training of priests in Melbourne back to the old days. For the first time he was a figure of public controversy, an able defender of his role and remarkably indifferent to derision. As in Ballarat, he continued in Melbourne to show an extraordinary talent for convincing politicians to fund church causes – a crucial element in his rise through the ranks in Australia.

None of this made him popular. Catholics were surprised – some appalled – when he was made auxiliary bishop of Melbourne in 1987. Picking the worst of what Pell did in the years that followed is difficult. Most contend it was his failure, despite having unquestionable evidence of the man’s crimes, to remove Peter Searson from Doveton primary school.

The teachers came to Pell begging him to remove the priest. The parents called for him to be sacked. The headteacher of the school put his job on the line to see the priest gone. The headteacher was removed. They did make Searson hand in his gun.

Gerald Ridsdale outside court with George Pell on 15 August 1993. Photograph: The Age/Fairfax Media/Getty Images

When Ridsdale was facing abuse charges, Pell escorted the priest to court. A grainy still from Channel Seven footage – showing Ridsdale in a spiv’s suit and dark glasses, and that bulky figure in black beside him – was to become a defining image of Pell’s downfall.

When he became – again, to the surprise of many Catholics – archbishop of Melbourne he instituted what he boasted was the first church scheme in the world to compensate victims. By this time settlements running into the millions were being reached in the US. But the Melbourne Response, as it was called, paid victims about $50,000, made them sign away their rights to sue and, for a time, bound them to silence.

The church spent more money on lawyers than compensating those whose lives had been wrecked by their paedophile employees.

Sorry. Priests aren’t employees. And the church doesn’t own property. These principles Pell reasserted in the courts when he became the cardinal archbishop of Sydney in 2001. Looked at in law, the Catholic church wasn’t responsible for priests’ misbehaviour, nor were the trustees responsible who held its Australian billions.

Those laws have changed now, thanks to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse which, of course, Pell opposed, but to which he gave evidence. That was a wise decision.

Not giving evidence at his trials was foolish. What would a juror think of this mighty man of the world choosing to stay silent and not defend himself in the face of such charges?

Guilty.

Baroque conspiracy theories are still washing about to explain why Victorian police charged Pell with abusing two boys in a busy room at St Patrick’s cathedral one morning after Sunday mass. Helping the theories survive is that none of us – apart from lawyers, judges, police, and the office of the director of public prosecutions in Victoria – have seen the evidence of the young man who came forward with the allegations.

We are not able to judge. One jury couldn’t decide. Another convicted. The appeal court of Victoria backed the jury. The high court knocked the conviction for six.

So the bent, bulky figure of George Pell emerged from prison. He published a prison memoir that doesn’t quite reach the heights of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis. He was given no work by the church. He died in Rome.

It’s hardly likely, but may he rest in peace.