Pope backs Australian cardinal in fight against sex abuse charges

VATICAN CITY – Cardinal George Pell said Thursday, June 29, that he would take a leave from the Vatican to return to Australia to fight child sex abuse charges after being given strong backing from Pope Francis, who has not asked him to resign from his senior Church post.

Pell, the Vatican’s finance chief and the highest-profile Catholic cleric to face such charges, said at a press conference at the Vatican that he had been a victim of “relentless character assassination” and vowed to clear his name and return to work in Rome.

“I am looking forward finally to having my day in court. I am innocent of these charges,” the 76-year-old said. “They are false. The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me.”

Pell, unofficially considered the number 3 in the Vatican hierarchy, said he had been in close contact with Francis in recent days and thanked the head of the Church for granting him leave.

In a strongly supportive statement, the Vatican said Pell’s staff would continue his work in his absence and noted Francis’s respect for the Australian’s “honesty” and “energetic dedication” to his work on Church financial reform.

“The Holy See expresses its respect for the Australian justice system that will have to decide the merits of the questions raised,” the statement said.

“At the same time, it is important to recall that Cardinal Pell has openly and repeatedly condemned as immoral and intolerable the acts of abuse committed against minors; has cooperated in the past with Australian authorities (for example, in his depositions before the Royal Commission); has supported the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors; and finally, as a diocesan bishop in Australia, has introduced systems and procedures both for the protection of minors and to provide assistance to victims of abuse.” 

Police in the Australian state of Victoria announced earlier that Pell had been charged with “historical sexual assault offenses”.

Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton told reporters: “There are multiple complainants relating to those charges.”

Pell was ordered to appear before Melbourne Magistrates Court on July 18.

No details of the charges were given and Patton would not take any questions, citing the need to preserve the integrity of the judicial process.

A lawyer for two unidentified men who had made abuse claims against Pell said they were “over the moon” about the charges.

“It’s been very difficult for them to stick their neck out,” the lawyer, Ingrid Irwin, told Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper. “To come out against someone who is second to God, in some people’s minds, has caused all sorts of problems for them.”

The repercussions for the Church could be significant, the editor of the Australian online forum Catholica, Brian Coyne, told Agence France-Presse.

“This is the most senior person in the church who has ever been charged and the implications are both huge for the future of the Catholic Church in this country and internationally,” Coyne said.

“Pope Francis must be feeling the heat at the moment and some embarrassment having his number-three senior manager facing these sorts of allegations.”

‘Mucked up’

The announcement coincides with the final stages of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, ordered in 2012 after a decade of pressure to investigate widespread allegations of institutional pedophilia.

The commission has spoken to thousands of survivors and heard claims of child abuse involving churches, orphanages, sporting clubs, youth groups and schools.

Pell has appeared before the commission 3 times, once in person and twice via video-link, during which he admitted that he “mucked up” in dealing with pedophile priests in Victoria state in the 1970s.

The Pell charges stem from investigations by a Victoria police task force into allegations emanating from the Royal Commission and from a state parliamentary inquiry.

The commission said in February that 7% of Catholic priests were accused of abusing children in Australia between 1950 and 2010 but that the allegations were never investigated.

It found that 4,444 alleged incidents of pedophilia were reported to church authorities and, in some dioceses, more than 15% of priests were perpetrators.

Pell was ordained in Rome in 1966 before returning to Australia in 1971, eventually becoming the country’s top Catholic cleric.

He was accused of sex abuse when he was the Archbishop of Sydney in 2002 but was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Asked last year about the allegations against the cardinal, Francis, who called him to the Vatican in 2014, said “we must avoid a media verdict, a verdict based on gossip”.

Patton, the Victoria police official, said the cardinal had been “treated the same as anyone else in this investigation”.

Coyne, for his part, said Pell had been a “divisive figure in the church in Australia for a long time”, and had a “very conservative” agenda that did not reflect the views of many Catholics in the country.

The percentage of Australians identifying themselves as Catholic has slipped in recent years from the most popular religion at 25.3% in 2011, to 22.6% last year – falling behind “no religion”. – Rappler.com