George Pell
Based on Wikipedia: George Pell
In January 2025, nearly two years after his death, a non-judicial program in Australia quietly announced that it had accepted claims that Cardinal George Pell sexually abused two boys in the 1970s. Compensation had already been paid to one victim—five weeks before Pell died. This posthumous finding cast a final shadow over one of the most powerful and polarizing figures in modern Catholic history.
George Pell's story is one of extraordinary ascent, fierce controversy, criminal conviction, dramatic acquittal, and unresolved questions that followed him even beyond the grave.
From Ballarat to Rome
Pell was born on June 8, 1941, in Ballarat, a gold rush city in the Australian state of Victoria. His parents came from different religious worlds. His father, George Arthur, was a non-practicing Anglican whose family traced back to Leicestershire in England. The elder George was also a heavyweight boxing champion—a detail that hints at a certain toughness that would characterize his son's approach to church politics.
His mother, Margaret, was a devout Catholic of Irish descent. In the religious landscape of mid-twentieth-century Australia, where sectarian tensions between Catholics and Protestants still simmered, Pell was raised firmly in his mother's faith.
As a child, Pell endured twenty-four operations to remove an abscess in his throat. This extended medical ordeal would have tested anyone's resilience, let alone a young boy's.
At St. Patrick's College in Ballarat, Pell excelled at Australian rules football, playing as a ruckman—the tall player who contests the ball at center bounces, similar to a basketball center's role at tip-off. He was good enough to reportedly sign with the Richmond Football Club in 1959, which would have set him on a path toward professional sports.
But something else was calling him.
"To put it crudely," Pell later said of his decision to enter the priesthood, "I feared and suspected and eventually became convinced that God wanted me to do His work, and I was never able to successfully escape that conviction."
That word "escape" is striking. It suggests not a joyful embrace of religious vocation but rather a reluctant surrender to what he perceived as divine command.
The Making of a Cardinal
Pell began his seminary studies in 1960 at Corpus Christi College in Werribee, a suburb of Melbourne. He continued to play football even while training for ordination—an unusual combination that speaks to his physical nature.
In 1963, he was sent to Rome to study at the Pontifical Urban University, one of the Vatican's own educational institutions. He was ordained a priest on December 16, 1966, at St. Peter's Basilica itself—the symbolic heart of Catholicism—by Cardinal Gregorio Pietro Agagianian, an Armenian prelate who had once been considered a candidate for pope.
After earning his theology degree in Rome, Pell went to Oxford University in England, where he completed a doctorate in church history in 1971. His thesis examined how authority was exercised in early Christianity between roughly 170 and 270 CE—the period when the church was transforming from a persecuted sect into an increasingly organized institution. This academic focus on ecclesiastical power would prove prophetic.
During his Oxford years, he served as chaplain to Catholic students at Eton College, the elite English boarding school that has educated generations of British prime ministers and royals. The young Australian priest was already moving in rarefied circles.
Rising Through the Ranks
Returning to Australia in 1971, Pell served in various parishes and educational roles in Victoria over the next fifteen years. He earned a master's degree in education from Monash University, ran Catholic educational institutions, and edited the diocesan newspaper.
In 1987, at age forty-five, Pell was appointed an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne. An auxiliary bishop assists the main bishop of a diocese—it's a stepping stone position, but it marks entry into the church's ruling class. He received what's called "episcopal consecration," the ceremony that makes someone a bishop, with the accompanying authority to ordain priests and confirm Catholics.
Nine years later, in 1996, Pell became Archbishop of Melbourne—the leader of all Catholics in Australia's second-largest city. In 2001, he was promoted again to become Archbishop of Sydney, the most prestigious Catholic position in the country.
Then came the red hat.
On September 28, 2003, Pope John Paul II announced that Pell would be elevated to cardinal. The College of Cardinals is the small group of senior church officials who advise the pope and, most importantly, elect his successor. Becoming a cardinal placed Pell among the roughly 120 men on earth who could enter the Sistine Chapel when a pope died and cast a vote for the next one.
With Pell's elevation, Australia had three cardinals eligible to vote in a papal election for the first time in its history.
The Power Broker
Pell was no mere ceremonial figure. He was a player in Vatican politics.
In the 2005 conclave following John Paul II's death, Pell reportedly served as an unauthorized "campaign manager" for Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the German theologian who became Pope Benedict XVI. The word "unauthorized" here is telling—there are supposed to be no campaigns in papal elections, which are theoretically guided by the Holy Spirit. But Pell was working the room.
In 2008, Pell's lobbying helped Sydney win the right to host World Youth Day, a massive Catholic youth gathering that brought Benedict XVI to Australia and drew half a million young people from two hundred countries. One million people came to see the pope during that visit.
When the next conclave came in 2013, following Benedict's stunning resignation, Pell was again maneuvering behind the scenes. He was thought to be organizing votes for Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan, the Italian cardinals' favored candidate. Scola lost to the Argentine cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis.
But Francis recognized Pell's administrative skills. He appointed the Australian to his inner circle, a group of eight cardinals tasked with reforming the Vatican's notoriously byzantine bureaucracy, known as the Roman Curia.
In February 2014, Francis gave Pell perhaps the most powerful job in Vatican administration: first prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy. Pell now controlled the annual budget of both the Holy See—the Vatican's central government—and Vatican City State itself. He had authority over the Vatican Bank, officially called the Institute for the Works of Religion, which had been plagued by scandals involving money laundering and mafia connections for decades.
Pell was essentially the Vatican's finance minister and chief auditor combined. He implemented new financial controls, distributed handbooks on international accounting standards, and tried to impose transparency on institutions that had operated in medieval opacity.
Not everyone appreciated this. Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio publicly questioned whether Pell had been given too much authority. The Vatican is an ancient court, and reformers often find themselves resisted by those comfortable with the old ways.
The Culture Warrior
Throughout his rise, Pell maintained what biographers called "strict adherence to Catholic orthodoxy"—meaning he held firm to traditional church teachings on issues like abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and the role of women.
But Pell went beyond simply upholding doctrine. He was a public combatant in culture wars, unafraid to use vivid language that his critics found inflammatory and his supporters found refreshing.
In 2001, warning against what he saw as declining religious faith, Pell reached back nearly three thousand years for an analogy: "We must not allow the situation to deteriorate as it had in Elijah's time, 850 years before Christ, where monotheism was nearly swamped by the aggressive paganism of the followers of Baal."
Baal was an ancient Near Eastern deity whose worship, according to the Hebrew Bible, led the Israelites astray. Pell was comparing modern secularism to idol worship.
In 2010, reviewing the blockbuster film Avatar, Pell wrote that its portrayal of nature worship was "old-fashioned pagan propaganda" and "a primitive stage in the movement towards acknowledging the one: the single Transcendent God, above and beyond nature."
He even issued guidelines in 2007 restricting what family members could say at Catholic funerals. The problem, he explained, was that "on not a few occasions, inappropriate remarks glossing over the deceased's proclivities (drinking prowess, romantic conquests etc) or about the church (attacking its moral teachings) have been made at funeral Masses."
The eulogy, Pell decreed, must never replace the priest's homily, which should focus on scripture, God's compassion, and the resurrection of Jesus—not on Uncle Frank's legendary pub sessions.
The Melbourne Response
In 1996, the same year he became Archbishop of Melbourne, Pell established something called the "Melbourne Response"—a protocol for investigating and handling complaints of child sexual abuse by clergy in his archdiocese.
This was groundbreaking. It was the first such formal protocol anywhere in the world. The Catholic Church had long dealt with abuse allegations through silence, transfers of accused priests to new parishes, and pressure on victims to stay quiet. Pell was creating an actual process.
But the Melbourne Response drew significant criticism. Victims' advocates argued that compensation caps were too low, that the process still protected the church's interests over survivors', and that it didn't go far enough in involving civil authorities. The protocol was a step forward, but critics saw it as an inadequate step, designed more to manage the church's legal exposure than to truly reckon with the abuse crisis.
What Did He Know?
Australia eventually established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse—a years-long national investigation with subpoena power that examined how churches, schools, orphanages, and other institutions had handled abuse allegations over decades.
The Royal Commission's findings, released in 2020, concluded that Pell knew of child sexual abuse by clergy as early as the 1970s but "did not take adequate action to address it."
This was damning. The commission wasn't saying Pell had personally abused children—that was a separate matter—but that he had known colleagues were abusing children and had failed to stop them or report them to authorities.
Pell rejected the finding. He said he was "surprised" and that the commission's conclusions "are not supported by evidence."
The tension between these positions defined how people saw Pell. To his defenders, he was a reformer who had tried to address the abuse crisis when others ignored it, and who was now being scapegoated. To his critics, he was part of a hierarchy that prioritized institutional reputation over children's safety, and his reforms were too little, too late, designed more for public relations than justice.
The Trial
In 2018, George Pell became the highest-ranking Catholic official ever convicted of child sexual abuse.
The charges alleged that in December 1996—just months after becoming Archbishop of Melbourne—Pell had sexually assaulted two thirteen-year-old choirboys in the sacristy of St. Patrick's Cathedral after Sunday Mass. The sacristy is the room where priests prepare for services and store vestments and sacred vessels.
One of the accusers had died of a heroin overdose in 2014, never having reported the abuse to police. The surviving accuser came forward after the Royal Commission hearings brought renewed attention to church abuse.
Pell denied everything.
His defense argued that the scenario was implausible. The sacristy would have been busy after Mass. Pell, as the newly installed archbishop, would have been greeting parishioners at the cathedral doors—the standard practice for a presiding clergyman. The timeline didn't work. There was no corroborating evidence, no witnesses, no forensic proof. It came down to one man's word against a cardinal's.
The first trial ended in a hung jury—the jurors couldn't agree. A second jury convicted Pell on all charges in December 2018. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
He served 404 days, much of it in solitary confinement. Australian prison authorities said this was for his own protection—a convicted child abuser, especially one so famous, would be a target for other inmates. But the effect was that an eighty-year-old man spent over a year largely alone in a cell.
The Acquittal
Pell's legal team appealed. The Victorian Court of Appeal upheld his conviction in a 2-1 decision in August 2019.
But then the case went to Australia's highest court.
On April 7, 2020, the High Court of Australia unanimously quashed Pell's convictions. All seven justices agreed.
The ruling, known as Pell v The Queen, didn't say the accuser had lied. It said that the jury, acting rationally on the evidence presented, should have had reasonable doubt. The unchallenged evidence about what typically happened in the sacristy after Mass, the movements of other people, the improbability of the assaults going unnoticed—all of this, the High Court said, made it impossible to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the abuse occurred.
Pell walked free.
The decision exposed a deep divide. Supporters hailed it as vindication, proof that Pell had been the victim of a witch hunt. Critics argued it showed only that the legal standard of "beyond reasonable doubt" is extremely difficult to meet in decades-old abuse cases with single accusers—not that the abuse didn't happen.
The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the office responsible for doctrinal matters, which also handles abuse cases—had opened its own investigation into Pell after his initial conviction. When the High Court acquitted him, that investigation closed. Under church law, which operates on different standards than criminal courts, the acquittal settled the matter.
The Posthumous Finding
But the story didn't end there.
Australia's National Redress Scheme is a non-judicial program established to provide compensation to survivors of institutional child sexual abuse. It operates outside the criminal justice system, with different rules and different standards of proof. Participation is voluntary—institutions join the scheme and agree to its processes.
In January 2025, almost two years after Pell's death, the scheme announced it had accepted claims that Pell had abused two boys in Ballarat in the 1970s—a different time and place from the cathedral allegations for which he had been tried and acquitted.
One of these accusers had received compensation five weeks before Pell died in January 2023. The cardinal went to his grave apparently unaware of this finding, or at least without any public response to it.
This posthumous development crystallized the impossible complexity of the Pell case. He had been convicted by a jury, freed by the nation's highest court, cleared by the Vatican, and then found responsible for abuse by a government compensation program—all concerning different alleged incidents at different times.
The Final Days
After his release from prison and the collapse of the charges against him, Pell returned to Rome. For the last two years and three months of his life, he lived in an apartment one block from the Vatican.
His health had been declining for years. In 2010, he had a pacemaker fitted after cardiac problems during a Vatican visit. In 2015, his heart condition was serious enough that doctors ruled he couldn't fly from Italy to Australia to testify before the Royal Commission. He gave evidence via video link from a Rome hotel instead, with Australian abuse survivors who had traveled to Rome watching from the gallery.
In early January 2023, Pell attended the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI, the man he had reportedly helped elect eighteen years earlier. A few days later, on January 10, Pell died of cardiac arrest following hip surgery at the Salvator Mundi hospital in Rome. He was eighty-one years old.
His body lay in state at the Church of St. Stephen of the Abyssinians, an ancient church within the Vatican walls. A Requiem Mass was celebrated at St. Peter's Basilica, presided over by the Dean of the College of Cardinals, with Pope Francis giving the final blessing.
Then Pell's body was flown home to Australia.
A Divided Farewell
George Pell's funeral Mass was held at St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney on February 1, 2023. It was closed to the general public—authorities cited concerns about protests.
The guest list told its own story about Pell's polarizing legacy.
Among those who attended were former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard, both conservatives who had known and supported Pell for years. Peter Dutton, then leader of the federal opposition, was also there.
Among those who did not attend: the serving Governor-General, David Hurley; Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; the Governor of New South Wales, Margaret Beazley; the Premier of New South Wales, Dominic Perrottet (himself a conservative Catholic); the opposition leader of New South Wales, Chris Minns; and the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore.
LGBTQ groups protested outside the cathedral. So did survivors of child sexual abuse and their supporters.
Pell was buried in the cathedral's crypt—interred beneath the building where he had served as Archbishop, in the city he had represented at the highest levels of his church.
Legacy of Contradiction
Tim Minchin, the Australian comedian and musician, wrote a satirical song about Pell during the Royal Commission hearings, questioning why the cardinal had relocated to Rome just as scrutiny of church abuse intensified. The song was crude and confrontational. Pell's supporters called it defamatory. Minchin said it gave voice to the anger of abuse survivors.
That dynamic—fierce defenders and fierce accusers, with almost no one in between—characterized Pell's entire public life.
To those who admired him, Pell was a man of intellectual depth and moral courage. He earned a doctorate from Oxford. He fought for traditional values in an increasingly secular world. He tried to reform the Vatican's finances when entrenched interests resisted transparency. He was convicted on what his supporters considered flimsy evidence, survived a year in prison, and was ultimately vindicated by the nation's highest court.
To those who despised him, Pell was a symbol of everything wrong with the Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse. He knew about abuse and didn't stop it. He rose to power while children suffered. His Melbourne Response was damage control, not justice. His acquittal proved only that criminal courts aren't built to handle cases with decades-old memories and single accusers—not that the survivor who testified against him was lying.
Both views find support in the record.
The Royal Commission found he knew about abuse and failed to act. The High Court found that reasonable doubt existed about the specific charges for which he was tried. The National Redress Scheme found, after his death, that he had abused two other boys decades earlier.
George Pell died as one of the most decorated churchmen Australia ever produced—Archbishop, Cardinal, Vatican finance minister—and one of its most reviled. He was a heavyweight's son who became a heavyweight in his own arena, fighting battles theological and bureaucratic with the same blunt force his father had brought to the boxing ring.
What he leaves behind is not resolution but argument: about guilt and innocence, about institutional responsibility, about whether criminal acquittal means anything more than that the prosecution couldn't prove its case beyond doubt, about whether the Catholic Church can ever truly reckon with what its priests did to children and what its bishops knew.
These questions outlived George Pell. They will outlive us all.