George Pell cut a lonely figure as he sat quietly reading.

The release of God Is Good For You coincided with the end of his first trial and as the jury deliberated in private nearby, Pell sat reading to himself.

Did the boy from Ballarat who rose to become one of the most powerful Catholics in the world need some reassurance? How had it all come to this?

PELL GUILTY OF CHILD SEX CRIMES

VICTIMS GIVE EVIDENCE IN PELL CASE

HECTIC SCENES GREET CARDINAL

He was a popular young student, promising ruckman, Oxford scholar, Archbishop of Australia’s two largest cities, cardinal, and third-highest ranked Catholic in the world as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, in charge of the Holy See’s finances.

The younger man liked swimming and kicking a football; if contemporaries later recalled a stridency of thought, they also remembered a good rapport with young people.

It was a surprise to many of his school friends when he signed up for the priesthood in 1960.

He could have been a teacher, a footballer for Richmond, a lawyer, maybe.

But with a devout Irish Catholic mother and a priest uncle, the jump to the seminary was not totally surprising.

His early contemporaries recall his hardline Catholic conservatism.

A prince of the church in the making, he bowed only to Rome.

Remembered for an impeccable work ethic, one former colleague remembers a man who believed anybody who spoke against the church was an “enemy”.

But as he climbed the ranks to become the public face of the Catholic Church in this country his detractors quickly outnumber his supporters.

He railed against same-sex marriage, contraception, and abortion, dubbing the latter: “a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people”.

The public at large, and many inside the church, found his conservative views unfathomable.

But he was never one to be swayed by public opinion.

Sexual assault victims have long blamed Pell for all the wrongs of the church.

His supporters say he worked tirelessly to implement change when he became Archbishop of Melbourne, and believe he was frustrated by a sense of powerlessness to act sooner.

They claim he has been the victim of a witch hunt because of a perceived failure to single-handedly stop child abuse within the church.

There was a public hatred for him as the face of the Catholic Church, and that hatred increased as he climbed the ranks of the organisation.

His critics say he could have, and should have, done more earlier.

He has been repeatedly forced to deny claims he has been complicit in the church’s cover-up.

He was accused of failing to take reports of abuse seriously while a young priest, helping shuffle paedophile priests between parishes as a bishop’s adviser, and trying to buy the silence of one of Gerald Ridsdale’s victims.

His support for Ridsdale, one of the Australian church’s worst ever child sex offenders, during a court appearance in the 1990s has plagued Pell’s career and public perception since.

“I’m a victim, so like everyone else I just want to see him go down,” one sexual assault victim said.

“Whether he did it or not, he’s as bad as the rest of them. He belongs in jail.”

The sentiment is one commonly held among victims of abuse.

But other Catholics, journalists, even barristers express similar feelings when asked about their views on Pell.

Globally though he carries more favour.

“He is so respected in the English speaking world outside of Australia,” one church insider says.

“This is seen internationally as an Australian persecution of a Catholic bishop.

“It will raise serious questions for the Vatican about whether they accept the Australian justice system.”

Questions have been raised about whether a jury could have reasonably been expected to deliberate impartially in relation to such a high-profile figure.

In the days after the Pell verdicts the Andrews government announced it would consider introducing judge-only trials in Victoria.

After being charged in June 2017 Pell confided to close aides that he was desperately looking forward to his day in court.

Once and for all he could shake off the rumours that had plagued him since he was first publicly accused of sexual misconduct.

The allegations that he abused an altar boy during a camp at Phillip Island in 1961 were not investigated by police then, but were investigated by the church in 2002, with Cardinal Pell cleared by retired Supreme Court judge Alec Southwell.

Now he was confident of beating fresh, much more serious allegations.

But as he sat there reading God is Good For You, the jury was days into its deliberations, a sign they were clearly not convinced of his innocence.

That jury would ultimately be discharged after the 12 members failed to reach a unanimous verdict.

The offer of returning an 11-1 majority verdict still couldn’t get them over the line.

A second jury would be quicker with its deliberations.

They would return confident, unanimous, guilty verdicts to all charges.

In the battle of truth they were asked to judge, the jurors backed the ex-choirboy’s version of events over Pell’s.

They believed he was a child rapist, who just months into the job as Melbourne’s seventh Catholic archbishop, brutally attacked two choirboys inside the city’s holiest site, St Patrick’s Cathedral.

At the time he was in the process of setting up the Catholic world’s first scheme for investigating and compensating claims of clerical sexual abuse.

American author George Weigel, Pope John Paul II’s biographer, blames an a decades long anti-Catholic sentiment he says has been a staple of Australian culture.

He has written that Pell was misrepresented as a “a power-hungry ecclesiastical politician, and that caricature made him a convenient scapegoat for the grave crimes of other priests.”

“Aggressive secularists couldn’t forgive him for his robust Catholicism. Most Catholic progressives couldn’t abide his orthodoxy,” he said.

“Some of Pell’s enemies had the integrity to dismiss the charges against him as ludicrous, and a few said afterward that his conviction was a travesty.”

Some Melbourne priests fear they are now “all in the gun”.

“It’s clear it is no longer possible for a Catholic priest to get a fair trial in this state,” one said.

“There’s a bit of a sense that the mob rule has found an innocent man guilty, and they don’t know how to rein it in.”

Clearly, the verdicts are a serious blow to Pell personally.

For the Australian church their implications are unclear, but one insider says: “we’ve already lost the people that hated Pell. But we need to work out how to respond to this.”

The global implications are likely to be greater, with the news coming days after Pope Francis concluded a landmark Vatican summit on child abuse.

It brought together almost 200 Catholic leaders from around the world for four days of lectures and workshops on preventing abuse and caring for victims.

Francis has been criticised for failing to offer a concrete plan to hold bishops accountable for abuse failings.

But he acted swiftly in the wake of the Pell verdicts, dumping him from his inner circle of trusted advisers, the Council of Cardinals.

The removal didn’t affect his treasury position, a five-year term which has just expired.

But sources say Pell knows his Vatican career cannot be revived, even if his convictions are quashed on appeal.

“He wants to go back there, say goodbye properly, and leave on his own terms,” one source said.

If he fails at an appeal, he faces the very real prospect of being defrocked.

He would be the most senior figure to be removed from the priesthood in modern times and the second since disgraced American cardinal Theodore McCarrick was defrocked last week.

It would ban him from wearing the Roman collar or any other priestly garment.

Similarly he would be banned from celebrating mass or performing weddings, baptisms or confessions.

Already his name has been struck from an honour board and building at his former school, St Patrick’s College, Ballarat.

When he returned to Melbourne to face dozens of heinous child sex allegations, Cardinal Pell believed he could avoid all of that.

A magistrate dismissed half of the charges he was facing, finding insufficient evidence for a jury to convict him at trial.

The Director of Public Prosecutions dropped more charges, after reaching the conclusion they could not be properly prosecuted.

In the end just five charges remained.

But the guilty verdicts on those charges spell the darkest day for Pell and the modern Catholic church.

In 1996, while the archbishop of Melbourne, Pell returned a call from a Herald Sun reporter.

The reporter had submitted questions to Pell relating to information showing that in the early 1970s he shared a house in Ballarat with a number of priests and Christian Brothers who years later were convicted of child sex offences.

Pell confirmed he had indeed shared a house with the brothers and priests.

But, he said, it was no big deal; he was unaware of their activities and in his view it wasn’t much of a story.

Despite his assessment of the story’s news value, the reporter told Pell the paper would be publishing the story the following day.

The Archbishop ended the phone call with a typical bombastic flourish: “Don’t ham it up too much.”

shannon.deery@news.com.au