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Australian Court Dismisses Cardinal's Sex Abuse Convictions

Associated Press

   CANBERRA - Australia's highest court has dismissed the convictions of
   the most senior Catholic found guilty of child sex abuse.

   High Court Chief Justice Susan Kiefel announced the decision of the
   seven judges on Tuesday in the appeal of Cardinal George Pell. The
   decision means he will be released fromBarwonPrison outside Melbourne
   after serving 13 months of a six-year sentence.

   Pope Francis' former finance minister was convicted by a Victoria state
   jury in 2018 of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choirboys in a back
   room of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in December 1996 while he
   was archbishop of Australia's second-largest city.

   Pell was also convicted of indecently assaulting one of the boys by
   painfully squeezing his genitals after a Mass in early 1997.

   Pell had been ordered to serve three years and eight months behind bars
   before he became eligible for parole.

   The High Court found that the Victorian Court of Appeal was incorrect
   in its 2-1 majority decision in August to uphold the jury verdicts.

   Pell was regarded as the Vatican's third-highest ranking official when
   he voluntarily returned to Melbourne in July 2017 determined to clear
   his name of dozens of decades-old child abuse allegations.

   All the charges were dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by courts in
   preliminary hearings over the years except the cathedral allegations.

   Pell was tried on the charges twice in 2018, the first County Court
   trial ending in a jury deadlock.

   Pell did not testify at either trial or at the subsequent appeals.

   But the juries saw his emphatic denials in a police interview that was
   video recorded in a Rome airport hotel conference room in October 2016.

   "The allegations involve vile and disgusting conduct contrary to
   everything I hold dear and contrary to the explicit teachings of the
   church which I have spent my life representing," Pell read from a
   prepared statement.

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