MELBOURNE, Australia — George Pell, an Australian cardinal who was the Vatican’s chief financial officer and an adviser to Pope Francis, is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday for molesting two boys after Sunday Mass in 1996.
The cardinal was convicted on five counts in December, making him the most senior Catholic official — and the first bishop — to be found guilty in a criminal court for sexually abusing minors, according to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. The severity of his sentence, which by law could be up to 50 years but is likely to be lower, will be closely watched around the world.
“The importance of this case cannot be understated,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org. “It will set a precedent.”
The sentence, to be handed down at a 10 a.m. hearing in Melbourne, Australia, where Cardinal Pell first rose to prominence as an archbishop, follows two years of legal jockeying over evidence and accusations of sexual abuse, most of which were kept from public view by Australia’s legal system until recently.
Cardinal Pell’s conviction was unsealed only two weeks ago, when the court lifted a suppression order that had kept the guilty verdict a secret in Australia for months.
The cardinal, 77, says he is innocent, and his lawyers have said they will appeal the conviction. In a sign of his once-rarefied status, he can count among his supporters two former Australian prime ministers, including one, John Howard, who submitted a character reference as part of a push for a reduced sentence.
But it is not at all clear that the court will be receptive to such pleas. The chief judge in the case, Peter Kidd, revealed some frustration at a hearing last month, telling Cardinal Pell’s lawyers there was no innocent explanation for their client’s behavior.
“At the moment I see this as callous, brazen offending,” the judge said. “Blatant.”
“It leaves to me only one inference,” he added, “which is at the time he thought he was going to get away with it.”
Cardinal Pell was convicted on five counts of abuse relating to two separate episodes. The most important evidence came from a single complainant, who said that after a Sunday Mass in late 1996 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, he and another 13-year-old boy sneaked into the priests’ sacristy, where they were discovered, reprimanded and molested by Cardinal Pell.
According to the man’s testimony, Cardinal Pell pushed the other boy toward his genitals, then moved on to the complainant. The cardinal put his penis into the boy’s mouth, before telling him to remove his pants, touching himself and the boy at the same time, he said.
Cardinal Pell was convicted of three counts of committing an indecent act with, or in the presence of, a child and one count of sexual penetration of a child under the age of 16.
A separate charge related to an episode some weeks later, in which the same complainant said the cardinal pushed him up against a wall and squeezed his genitals.
Each of the five charges carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Neither the complainant nor the other victim, who died in 2014, can be named under Australian law.
Throughout the proceedings, Cardinal Pell has been a silent figure in black priestly garb, sitting at the back of the courtroom in Melbourne, staring into the middle distance or taking notes, as his legal team tried to persuade jurors that no man of such prominence would risk it all to abuse two 13-year-old boys.
In a trial that began in August, the approach worked; it ended with a mistrial. But a second trial that started in November yielded a conviction. In February, the cardinal was jailed to await sentencing.
In Australia, at least, there were few figures of any religion who were better known or more combative in matters of faith and politics.
[Largely because of George Pell, Australia’s Catholic church has a full bank account but empty pews.]
Cardinal Pell’s career spanned decades, starting with his time as a parish priest in his hometown, Ballarat, followed by stints as archbishop of Melbourne and, later, of Sydney.
He became a cardinal in 2005. In 2014, Pope Francis named him the prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, charging him with overseeing the Vatican’s finances.
At every point, he was a savvy financial operator — he is well known, in part, for protecting church finances from large payouts to abuse victims — and a culture warrior. He could frequently be found raising money for conservative causes in Australia, publicly condemning homosexuality and stepping into policy debates as well, opposing, for example, legislation to allow adoption by gay parents.
At the same time, he was trailed by accusations of sexual abuse reaching back to the 1960s, when he was a seminarian. His denials always won out, until two years ago, when he returned to Australia from the Vatican to face a variety of charges.
Besides the episodes for which he was convicted, a handful of other allegations, from the 1970s, nearly came to trial. Cardinal Pell was accused of touching two boys on the genitals while playing with them in a swimming pool, and another boy in a lake.
Those charges made it all the way to pretrial hearings. But after the judge deemed some evidence inadmissible last month, prosecutors decided not to proceed. With a trial on those charges no longer pending, the judge lifted his gag order, allowing news outlets in Australia to report Cardinal Pell’s conviction.
Since then, more allegations against Cardinal Pell have emerged. The relatives of at least one victim — the second 13-year-old he was convicted of abusing, who later died — have said that they plan to sue Cardinal Pell and the church in civil court.
And on Wednesday, not far from the cathedral where the abuse took place, the proceedings surrounding Cardinal Pell will no longer be shrouded in secrecy. His sentencing will be broadcast live from the County Court of Victoria, reflecting what a court spokesman called a commitment “to the principles of open justice.”
Source : Nytimes
