Cardinal George Pell completed his comeback tour Oct. 12 with a half-hour audience with Pope Francis. When Cardinal Pell left Rome in 2017 to return to Australia to face those abuse charges his future seemed bleak, while that of his nemesis, then-Archbishop Angelo Becciu, seemed almost unlimited.
This past week, Cardinal George Pell, who was the Vatican’s first prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy and who was archbishop of Sydney, had his conviction for sexual offenses upheld by a court of appeals in Melbourne, Australia. The statement by Chief Justice Anne Ferguson read:
On Aug. 21, in a 2-1 decision, the conviction of Cardinal George Pell was upheld by the Victoria state Court of Appeal in Melbourne, Australia.
CARDINAL GEORGE Pell’s December 2018 conviction on charges of “historic sexual abuse” was a travesty of justice, thanks in part to a public atmosphere of hysterical anti-Catholicism – a fetid climate that had a devastating impact on the possibility of his receiving a fair trial.
Shortly after Cardinal George Pell was named Archbishop of Melbourne, he instituted several reforms at the archdiocesan seminary, including daily Mass and the daily celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, both of which had fallen by the wayside in the preceding years.
