Cardinal Pell One of the Church’s most senior members has walked free from prison in Australia after the country’s High Court decided to quash his child sex abuse conviction this week.
Cardinal George Pell, 78, was acquitted of sexually assaulting two teenage choirboys in the 1990s, allowing him to be released from jail on April 7.
The High Court ordered his convictions to be removed and verdicts of acquittal to be entered in their place, ending the most high-profile case of alleged clerical sex abuse.
He was acquitted on all five counts of sexually abusing the 13-year-olds when the court overturned earlier decisions of a jury and lower appeals court.
Proof
Cardinal Pell, a former finance minister of Pope Francis, has maintained his innocence throughout.
A jury had convicted him of the offences in December 2018 before that decision was upheld by a three-judge panel in Victoria State’s Court of Appeal last August.
The former Vatican treasurer was jailed earlier this year, but Australia’s High Court found there was “a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof”.
All seven judges unanimously found that the lower court had “failed to engage with the question of whether there remained a reasonable possibility that the offending had not taken place, such that there ought to have been a reasonable doubt as to the applicant’s guilt”.
Cardinal Pell said his acquittal remedied “a serious injustice”, but that he held “no ill will” towards his accuser.
“I do not want my acquittal to add to the hurt and bitterness so many feel; there is certainly hurt and bitterness enough,” he said.
He added that his 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”.
The prosecution’s case had relied almost entirely on the testimony of one of the boys, who testified in a closed-door hearing that he had been sexually assaulted in a cathedral while Cardinal Pell was Archbishop of Melbourne.
The second boy, who is not known to have ever spoken of the abuse, died of a drug overdose in 2014.
Improbabilities
Cardinal Pell’s lawyers had argued there were “compounding improbabilities” in the case, including that he would not have had the time or opportunity to molest the boys in the priests’ sacristy after Mass.
The High Court found that though the jury had “assessed the complainant’s evidence as thoroughly credible and reliable”, evidence from other witnesses required the jury “acting rationally” to have “entertained a reasonable doubt as to the applicant’s guilt”.