Cardinal George Pell, the highest-ranking member of the Catholic Church to ever be convicted of child sex abuse, only for his verdict to be overturned after a two-year legal battle in 2020, died Tuesday, according to Vatican media outlets.
Pell’s Secretary, Father Joseph Hamilton, confirmed he suffered a cardiac arrest after a successful hip replacement surgery on Tuesday.
In a statement on Facebook, Peter Comensoli, the Archbishop of Melbourne, said, “Cardinal Pell was a very significant and influential Church leader, both in Australia and internationally, deeply committed to Christian discipleship.”
The Vatican did not immediately comment on the cardinal’s death.
Australia’s most prominent Catholic cleric, Pell spent 404 days in solitary confinement at a Melbourne prison after he was convicted in 2018 of five counts related to the molestation of two choirboys two decades prior. With an unanimous jury decision, he was sentenced to six years in prison.
Pell appealed, and in April 2020 a panel of seven High Court judges dismissed the jury verdict as unreasonable, saying there was a “significant possibility” Pell was innocent. The decision was criticized by legal experts who noted the prosecution’s opacity, including a refusal to release the testimony of Pell’s primary accuser.
The process was also marked by a sweeping suppression order that initially prevented any Australian media from reporting on the trial, including Pell’s name and the gag order itself.
Upon learning that his conviction had been overturned, Pell “punched the air and then said Te Deum, which is the Christian prayer of thanks,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune last year.
In a statement, Pell said he held “no ill will” towards his accuser, who was identified as Witness J during his trial. (His other alleged victim died before charges were brought).
“However my trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church; nor a referendum on how Church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of paedophilia in the Church,” he continued. “The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes, and I did not.”
In interviews after the then-78-year-old walked free, Pell recalled the experience of imprisonment with ambivalence. “Jail is undignified, you’re at the bottom of the pit, you’re humiliated, but by and large I was treated decently, so that was a big help” he told the BBC last year. He added that the “worst single thing” had been being subjected to strip-searches.
A month after his appeal was granted, the Australian government released a previously redacted report that had found Pell had known for decades about other instances of clergy members preying upon children, but had failed to take any action.
In one account, according to a Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Assault’s report, a witness said that, as a young teen in 1974, he’d approached then-Father Pell to tell him that another priest was abusing children. Pell reportedly replied: “Don’t be ridiculous.”
The commission also said that Pell had lied to the inquiry’s panel in 2015, testifying that a bishop had misled him about Gerald Ridsdale, an Australian priest under Pell’s jurisdiction who was later convicted of abusing close to 70 victims.
“It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me,” Pell told the panel, according to the report.
The commission wrote that it did not accept that “Pell was deceived, intentionally or otherwise,” adding that Pell had known that Ridsdale was being shuttled from parish to parish to avoid scandal.
Prior to his legal woes, Pell had been appointed the first prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy by Pope Francis in 2014. Lifted up to occupy the Vatican’s No. 3 spot, Pell oversaw the economic activities of the Holy See, which had previously been marred by claims of financial mismanagement and a lack of accountability. His term expired in 2019.
Pell returned to Rome after his release from prison. He held no official position in his final years, but regularly met with Pope Francis, whom he said had been “very supportive” of him.
A few days before his death, Pell had attended the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. He emphasized to Catholic outlet EWTN that Benedict had been “a quiet, gentle, pious man, absolute gentleman.”
In the BBC interview, Pell said that the fact that his legacy was inextricably linked to the church’s sex abuse crisis was “a good thing.”
“My only concern is to get the truth out there,” he said. “It doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things what people think about me, but I am keen that the church is not judged unfairly.”
“God knows that we’ve got more than enough to be guilty about.”
