Inside Pope Francis and George Pell’s complicated relationship

While Pope Francis and Cardinal George Pell were politically and ideologically opposed, the two were aligned when it came to overhauling the Vatican’s troubled finances.

Pope Francis and the late Cardinal George Pell were politically and ideologically opposed but they were aligned when it came to overhauling the Vatican’s troubled finances.

Pell was appointed by Francis as the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy in 2014 after the late Australian cardinal was vocal about cleaning up the church’s financial affairs.

But despite having a productive working relationship, when Pell died in early 2023 it was revealed he had been heavily critical of the Pope, even penning an anonymous memo that described Francis’s tenure as a “catastrophe”.

The memo said “Christ is being moved from the centre” of the church under Francis and the Vatican’s international status had fallen to a “low ebb”.

Pope Francis and Australian cardinal George Pell during a private audience at the Vatican. Picture: Handout / VATICAN MEDIA / AFP

But Francis praised Pell after his death, saying: “Consistent and committed witness, his dedication to the gospel and to the church, and particularly his diligent co-operation with the Holy See in its recent economic reform, for which he laid the foundations with determination and wisdom.”

Hendro Munsterman, Vatican correspondent at the Netherlands’ Dagblad newspaper, said the two men had a very respectful relationship despite their differing political and ideological views.

“It was very clear that Pope Francis and Cardinal Pell were on the same lines when it came to the financial affairs of the Vatican and Cardinal Pell did a very good job there, it had to reform from [within] the Vatican, restructure the whole thing,” he said.

“But on moral issues, Pope Francis and Cardinal Pell were on very different lines.”

Ireland’s Sunday Independent Rome-based columnist Paddy Agnew said Francis made Pell his “economic tsar” and he completed a “serious job” of fixing the Vatican’s finances.

“But then others forces in Australia probably got in on the act in the sense that they basically dug up the whole child abuse accusations … and completely put George Pell out of business and he had to resign here and go back down and fight his case in Australia,” he said.

When Pell was acquitted of child sexual abuse in the High Court of Australia in 2020, Francis at the time reflected on the “persecution that Jesus suffered” and prayed for anybody suffering “unjust sentences”.

At the beginning of mass at Santa Marta in the Vatican shortly after the High Court handed down its decision, Francis said: “I would like to pray today for all those people who suffer unjust sentences resulting from intransigence [against them].”

There’s no doubt Pell certainly had his critics, including Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who was Pell’s deputy at the economy ministry, and the subject of embezzlement claims.

The pair regularly disagreed over the Vatican’s financial reset before Pell was forced to leave Rome and return to Australia in 2017 to fight child sexual abuse charges.