Cardinal George Pell arrives at the County Court in Melbourne, Australia February 26, 2019. (Reuters)Written by Livia Albeck-Ripka
Cardinal George Pell, the highest-ranking Catholic clergyman convicted of sexually abusing children, left a courtroom in Melbourne, Australia, on Wednesday flanked by police officers to spend his first night in jail, after a judge heard arguments to determine his sentence for molesting two choirboys in 1996.
Wednesday’s hearing followed months of judicial proceedings that were kept out of the news media by a strict gag order, and which resulted in the cardinal’s conviction on five charges in December.
Hours after the hearing, the Vatican said that it would conduct its own investigation of the cardinal, who had been a top adviser to Pope Francis, and that he no longer held a powerful Vatican post.
Judge Peter Kidd of the County Court of Victoria told a packed courtroom Wednesday that Pell’s “brazen, callous offending” deserved a commensurate punishment and said he would sentence the cardinal March 13.
Pell, 77, technically faces up to 50 years in prison for crimes that include sexual penetration of a minor. One of the two victims said Pell abused him in the sacristy of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, soon after Pell was named that city’s archbishop.
“He did it,” Kidd said of Pell. “He engaged in some shocking conduct against two boys, and he had the capacity to reason and did it in such brazen circumstances that he obviously felt some degree of impunity.”
The case coincides with a change in the Catholic Church’s approach to clerical abuse, and the cardinal will be sentenced just days after Pope Francis concluded a summit of church leaders in which he promised that abusers would meet “the wrath of God.”
A Vatican spokesman said Wednesday that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog that also handles sexual abuse cases, would conduct a canonical investigation into the charges against Pell. That, in turn, could lead to a church trial.
This month, the pope defrocked Theodore E. McCarrick, a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington, after a canonical trial found him guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians. He was the first person who had held such high rank in the Catholic Church to be removed from the priesthood because of the sexual abuse scandals of recent years.
Last October, Pell resigned as a member of the Council of Cardinals, the nine-member group he had named as his advisers. On Wednesday, the Vatican’s spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti, said that Pell was no longer prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, a powerful post he had held since February 2014.
Pell’s lawyers on Wednesday dropped their application for bail and said they would appeal the conviction after his sentence was delivered. Unusually, the cardinal was not previously remanded to jail after his conviction because he recently underwent knee-replacement surgery.
“Despite the unprecedented media coverage, Cardinal Pell has always and continues to maintain his innocence,” defense lawyer Paul Galbally said in a statement. “Like any person he has the right to pursue his legal rights and will do so.”
In court, Wednesday, Robert Richter, another defense lawyer, argued that the cardinal’s sentence should be mitigated because at the time of the offenses, he had no special relationship or duty of care to the children he abused after Sunday Mass.
But Kidd said that the cardinal’s actions absolutely involved “a breach of trust,” which began the moment the boys’ parents dropped their children at the church that morning. “Every single member of the church” had a responsibility to the boys, he said.
Richter also produced a list of character references, that, he said, showed the cardinal to be a kind and generous man with a “great deal of compassion.” Among the references was a letter written by John Howard, a former prime minister of Australia.
The prosecution produced two victims’ statements from the main complainant in the case and from the father of the second boy, who died in 2014.
Prosecutor Mark Gibson called the abuse “humiliating and degrading toward each boy and gave rise to stress.”
Pell was charged with four counts of an indecent act, and one act of sexual penetration with a minor, which Gibson said carried maximum terms of 10 years each.
Given his age and the slim chance of reoffending, experts said, it was unlikely he would receive the maximum penalty.
In a rare display of emotion at one point in the hearing, Pell was seen removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. He remained with his eyes closed for a few moments, silently nodding his head.
As he left the courtroom in police custody, Pell bowed to Kidd.
