Cardinal Pell’s death brings few tears in Australia

At St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, the polarising legacy Cardinal George Pell leaves in his Australian homeland was evident.
The cathedral is where Cardinal Pell first rose to the rank of archbishop. It is also where he is accused of molesting two choirboys in the 1990s.
As news of his death spread on Wednesday, mourners were pictured attending a commemorative mass at the church. They shuffled past ribbon tributes left for victims and survivors of child sex abuse on the cathedral fence.
Cardinal Pell was Australia’s most powerful Catholic, but he was also reviled by many.
During a career spanning six decades, Cardinal Pell worked his way through the ranks of the Church in Victoria, serving as Archbishop of both Melbourne and then Sydney, before he became one of the Pope’s top aides.
“He was a man who put Australia at the centre of the Catholic world in a way it never has been before,” Australian Catholic University historian Miles Pattenden told the BBC.
Even before he faced charges himself, Cardinal Pell’s reputation in Australia was marred by the Church’s failure to tackle its child sex abuse crisis.
“There is a sense in which he became a lightning rod for the anger,” historian and former Catholic priest Paul Collins told the BBC.
As a leader, many Australians felt he bore some responsibility for the broader Church’s concealment of abuse, he says.
But a landmark inquiry into child sex abuse in institutional settings found Cardinal Pell also personally knew of child sexual abuse by priests in Australia as early as the 1970s and had failed to take action. Cardinal Pell disputed the findings, saying they were “not supported by evidence”.
The cleric also faced criticism as an architect of the Australian Church’s first victim compensation scheme.
Called The Melbourne Response, the scheme was hailed by Cardinal Pell’s supporters as evidence of his keenness to address the crisis. But it capped compensation payouts, forced many survivors to waive their right to lawsuits, and was accused of generally lacking compassion.
A review of the scheme’s operations between 1996 and 2014 found it spent as much money on administration as it did compensating more than 300 victims.
Then in 2018 a jury convicted Cardinal Pell of abusing two boys while Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.
Cardinal Pell, who always maintained his innocence, spent 13 months in prison before the High Court of Australia quashed the verdict in 2020, finding the jury had not properly considered all the evidence at his trial.
But the father of one of his alleged victims is now suing for damages in a civil court. The suit will continue against the Archdiocese of Melbourne and Cardinal Pell’s estate.