Road tripping George Pell looks shadow of his former self

Prison life has aged George Pell. He weighs less and was caught in clothes he might wear to weed the garden.

Cardinal George Pell leaves the Glenrowan North service station, where he stopped on his road trip from Melbourne to Sydney on Wednesday. Picture: David Geraghty

Prison life has aged George Pell. He weighs less and he was caught on Wednesday in clothes he might otherwise have been wearing as he headed to weed the garden.

But the 78-year-old cardinal hasn’t lost his wit or sense of timing, even after years of fighting Victoria’s criminal justice system and a community disgusted by the extent of Catholic sex abuse.

“I’d like to say the court has made a very good decision,’’ he said after pulling himself slowly out of the black SUV at the Glenrowan North BP service station in northeast Victoria.

“I’m sorry I’m not dressed a bit better but I didn’t expect this.”

It’s a fair bet Cardinal Pell understood the context, leaving jail after 405 days only to be ambushed by the television cameras in the heart of Kelly country.

Asked about his experience in jail, the cardinal replied to the journalist: “Before you arrived, it was better here.”

Cardinal Pell spent much of yesterday travelling the Hume Freeway to start a new life in Sydney, which is a familiar, old destination for him. With his close friend Chris Meaney at the wheel, the pair pulled out of the Carmelite monastery in inner-city Melbourne about 10.30am for the slow but steady journey well away from Barwon Prison.

Breakfast served by the nuns had been followed by a short walk in the gardens, which are surrounded by high walls. Almost fortified.

After a low-key media chase of a couple of hours, Cardinal Pell declared he was “not in the slightest’’ surprised by the High Court’s decision to set him free.

He wandered into the service station to buy a phone charger and Melbourne’s Herald Sun, which carried the screaming front-page headline “HELL AND BACK’’ before looking terribly relieved that he could have his privacy again.

As pedestrian as this meeting was in Glenrowan, these were the first words he had uttered publicly since 2017 that didn’t involve the words “not guilty’’.

At Goulburn in NSW, the cardinal and his driver went into the police station and apparently complained about the media following them. No action was taken.

Friends of the cardinal expect his sunset years to be focused on Sydney, where he has many friends and colleagues and, if this is possible, he is less well known than Victoria.

Particularly his home city of Ballarat, where the dark history of abuse hangs over the church.

There are two schools of thought about how Cardinal Pell will live.

The first is he will retire, but few expect this to be an idle sendoff tending a garden in the suburban seminary he is likely headed for.

The second is that he will steel himself to return to Rome, in whatever capacity he can manufacture.

More likely, he will play a significant backroom role in church affairs, particularly given that Pope Francis appears to be sympathetic to his cause.

But a nasty vandalism attack on St Patrick’s Cathedral in ­Melbourne on the night he was released from prison underscores the difficulties he will have, and potentially pose for the church.

Not the least is the publishing of the redacted chapters of the sex abuse royal commission and the threat of civil legal action that may or may not eventuate.

Then there is the shadow of the cathedral allegations that were quashed by the High Court.

The complainant in his case yesterday left behind an eloquent and slightly melancholy statement about Cardinal Pell’s ­acquittal.

“This case does not define me. I am not the abuse I suffered as a child,’’ he wrote in a statement distributed by his lawyer Viv Waller.

“My journey has been long and I am relieved that it is over.’’