What a Powerful Cardinal’s Complex Legacy Tells Us About the Catholic Church’s Culture Wars

When Australian Cardinal George Pell, the most senior member of the Catholic Church to ever be convicted—and then exonerated—of sex abuse crimes, died unexpectedly in Rome on Tuesday, the public reactions were heated. Some mourned the loss of a hero of the church, and spoke of him as, already, a modern-day saint. Others celebrated his death, speaking bitterly of the pain he had left behind.

Very few recent figures in the Catholic church have left such a divisive legacy as Pell, who died at age 81 from cardiac arrest after minor hip surgery. He was once considered the third most powerful person in the church, and the rise, fall, and redemption of a powerful conservative has served to both energize and muddy the conversations within the church about sex abuse and justice.

Pell’s legal saga began in 2017, when he was first accused of sexual misconduct. Those charges were based on claims that he had molested two teenage choirboys in 1996 and ‘70 while he was archbishop of Melbourne. He was convicted of abuse in 2018, and after spending more than a year in prison on charges of child sex abuse, he was released in 2020 after the court reversed its ruling, finding insufficient evidence for the charges.

After his release, some Catholics came to lionize Pell as a victim of the secular world’s anti-religious fervor, and he became a symbol of perceived anti-Christian prejudice at work in secular institutions. While in prison, he received thousands of letters of support from around the world. But there was a second layer to the narrative: Pell, who had never wavered in his hard-line stances on same-sex marriage, homosexuality, abortion, contraception, and keeping women out of the priesthood (as well as climate change denialism), also became a symbol for the cultural assault on the out-of-fashion cultural conservative. To many conservative Catholics, it seemed that Pell had never had a chance at a fair trial.

Pell was well situated to take advantage of these resentments. Widely described as a charismatic, ambitious, and savvy man, Pell stoked this image from inside prison, purportedly writing letters to his supporters proclaiming his innocence (and weighing in on Vatican affairs). While incarcerated, he wrote a three-volume memoir reflecting on “daily activities, personal thoughts, love for his fellow man, and beautiful, moving prayers,” according to his publisher. After his release, he appeared often in conservative Catholic media, which tended to portray him as a living martyr. (They weren’t alone. After the acquittal, Pope Francis compared “people who suffer an unjust sentence resulting from intransigence” to the persecution of Jesus.)

In 2018, the year Pell was convicted, allegations emerged accusing American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of sex abuse. McCarrick, considered a more progressive figure in the church, faced a significantly higher number of and more substantial allegations. McCarrick hasn’t yet been convicted in a criminal court—he pleaded not guilty in 2021—but the church tried and then laicized him in 2019, making him the first cardinal to ever be defrocked for sexual abuse. In the eyes of some culture war Catholics, though, it seemed that the progressive McCarrick had been treated much more gently than the conservative McCarrick.

Pell’s acquittal came as a political boost to some conservatives in the church, as it seemed to bolster their narrative of victimization. As one priest wrote in 2020 in the National Catholic Register: “Sexual-abuse allegations, even those totally uncorroborated and fantastic, can be weaponized to persecute Catholic figures who run afoul of a new intolerant secularist extremism.”

But while Pell came out publicly against Francis’ attempts at dialogue within the church, to group him together with the pope’s enemies would be an oversimplification. The pope reportedly maintained a belief in Pell’s innocence. The Catholic journalist Austen Ivereigh, who has written two biographies of Francis and co-authored a third book with the pope, isn’t known to hold his tongue when discussing Francis’ critics. But in a tweet Tuesday, he spoke admiringly of Pell: “The Aussie Cardinal was tough, direct, vigorously conservative, warm, kind, down to earth, & a pioneer of Francis’s financial reform. RIP.”

Pell has for decades stood out as a towering figure in the Australian church. He was appointed a bishop in Melbourne in the 1980s, the archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s, and the archbishop of Sydney in the 2000s. In the meantime, in 1990, he started taking up roles within the various Vatican offices, gathering power and influence and eventually becoming a cardinal in 2003, landing him, ultimately, on a list of potential future papal candidates. Finally, in 2014, he was named prefect of the Vatican’s newly created Secretariat for the Economy—the Vatican treasurer, essentially—and was tasked with executing Francis’ financial reforms. He made enemies who resented his attempts to centralize its finances and hire an outside auditor. In this position, Pell was the third most powerful person in the church, and he became one of Francis’ closest advisers.

(Some have argued that Pell’s doubters were not those in the church dedicated to reform over the abuse crisis, but instead those who resented Pell for his efforts at financial reform. Vatican politics are notoriously messy. Pell also accused Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu of setting him up in order to quash Pell’s reform efforts. Becciu is now claiming his own conspiracy, as he is on trial in the Vatican for embezzlement and abuse of office—the Vatican’s first ever criminal trial of a cardinal.)

Pell’s rise finally ended in 2017, when he returned to Australia to face the criminal charges against him. He served 13 months in prison, in solitary confinement out of concern for his safety. In 2020 Australia’s high court undid that conviction, arguing that there wasn’t enough evidence and that the jury “ought to have entertained a doubt as to the applicant’s guilt.” The father of those two choirboys also brought a lawsuit against the cardinal. That lawsuit was still pending at the time of his death.

But it’s not just the allegations of criminal behavior that haunted Pell; he’s also been accused of turning a blind eye to abuse. Early in his career, he sat on a committee that transferred a priest later convicted of child sex abuse. (In 2020, an Australian royal commission declared it “implausible” that Pell hadn’t known why the priest had been moved from parishes. Pell always maintained he truly hadn’t known.) In 1996, he also developed a blueprint for investigation and counseling within the archdiocese of Melbourne to deal with the decades of allegations. That system proved controversial—it was heralded as a step forward at a time when so many church leaders stuck to denials, but criticized for having caps on payouts and for generally failing to acknowledge the depth of the damage done.

Few, though, have mentioned these potential leadership failures in remembering Pell. Leaders in the church have either stayed quiet, or spoken admiringly of his grace while facing persecution. In these conversations, the gray areas have to do with how much his conservative values affected his treatment at the hands of the courts or press or Rome, and not whether he can be held to account for the sins of the institution.

We will likely never know how much, if at all, Pell is personally responsible for any of the church’s failings. But given Pell’s association with the sex abuse crisis, his rebrand as a persecuted hero left many Catholics with a sour taste.