George Pell High Court ruling vindicates those who kept the faith

Cardinal George Pell leaves Barwon Prison after his conviction on child sex abuse charges was quashed by the High Court.

The High Court, 7-0, has homed in on the precise points that those familiar with George Pell’s working life and with St Patrick’s Cathedral have known from the outset.

There was always doubt about the grotesque offences for which the cardinal has spent 13 months and 10 days in jail, most of it in solitary confinement.

This doubt, the High Court noted, related to the Archbishop’s practice of greeting people on or near the Cathedral steps after Sunday mass; the established practice that an archbishop, when robed, was always accompanied in the Cathedral and the continuous traffic in and out of the priests’ sacristy for 10 to 15 minutes after the procession that ended Sunday solemn mass.

Two things have kept Pell going through the disgraceful miscarriage of justice and several years of torment leading up to it – his innocence and his faith. He’s kept on “an even keel’’ spiritually, he told friends, with his Bible and Breviary (a liturgical book of the psalms, scripture readings and prayers that priests and many others read every day).

One of his greatest joys after his release will be offering mass again. He has not been able to do so while inside. The fact that this is Holy Week, when Christ held his Last Supper where he instituted the priesthood, suffered and was crucified ahead of his resurrection on Easter Sunday gives added poignancy to this extraordinary saga.

Like the pastor he has been since his ordination in Rome 53 years ago, Pell reached out to others in jail – the many prisoners who wrote to him, to whom he wrote back.

In his first public statement after his acquittal on Tuesday he made it clear he did not want to add to the hurt and bitterness so many already feel. But his trial was not a referendum on the church or how church authorities dealt with the crime. As Cardinal Pell’s successor, Sydney archbishop Anthony Fisher said, justice for victims is never served by the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of anyone.

Pell’s statement, in keeping with his character, was free of rancour, self pity and bitterness. He has no ill will towards his accuser.

While strenuously maintaining his innocence throughout his trials, imprisonment and appeals, he has shown an appreciation for the sufferings of the victims of child sexual abuse. He has been praying for them, and has told friends he had offered up his ordeal in reparation for the sins against children committed and covered up within the church.

“The knowledge that my small suffering can be used for good purposes through being joined to Jesus’s suffering gives me purpose and direction,’’ he told a friend on the phone from jail.

It was also in Holy Week, two years ago (on Spy Wednesday, the day Judas did the deal to betray Jesus), that Robert Richter QC, representing the Cardinal in his first trial questioned Victoria Police about Operation Tethering.

“Operation Tethering, that wasn’t a ‘get Pell’ operation was it?” Mr Richter asked.

The policeman on the stand answered: “I guess you could term it the way you did but I wouldn’t term it that way”.

Why that extraordinarily named operation was launched by Victoria Police in 2013 is one of many questions about the matter that will need to be answered. Some who have followed events closely from day one think nothing short of a Royal Commission into Victorian policing and justice will sort out what went so grossly wrong and why.

It gives anyone facing that system, especially those without the resources to battle all the way to the High Court, pause for concern.

Tuesday’s decision is being celebrated around the world. Pell has a vast following. And a few Vatican officials, who moved heaven and earth to shut down his financial reforms and breathed a sigh of relief when he returned to Australia in June 2017, will be hoping COVID-19 will keep him away from the Eternal City for the foreseeable future.