A protest attended by relatives and victims of sexual abuse marked today, in Sydney, the funeral of Australian Cardinal George Pell, convicted and later acquitted of the crime of pedophilia.
Hundreds of people gathered outside St. Mary’s in a protest called by a gay rights group, chanting, “Pell, go to hell.”
Relatives and victims of child sexual abuse, who tied hundreds of ribbons to the cathedral’s bars on Wednesday, joined the protest with signs reading: “Forget Pell, remember the children.”
Australian police went to court to try to have the protest banned, with Deputy Commissioner David Hudson stressing that “various aspects” of the march posed “a risk to public safety”.
The chants of the protesters prevented the parishioners gathered in the courtyard of the cathedral from seeing and hearing the mass celebrated in memory of George Pell, broadcast on screens, which caused verbal confrontations between the two groups.
The funeral was attended by hundreds of faithful, including former Conservative Prime Minister John Howard and opposition leader Peter Dutton, although the current head of the Australian Government, Anthony Albanese, was not present.
In his homily, Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher said “the slanders of enemies were unfounded and the arrest unjust, and history will remember [George Pell] (…) for bravery”.
Pell, who died on January 10 in Rome at the age of 81, was the Secretary of the Economy, the third most important figure in the Vatican State, when in 2017 he was formally accused of five sexual assaults on two minors in the 1990s. .
Convicted in December 2018, Pell was sentenced to six years in prison for acts committed at St. Patrick’s when he was Archbishop of Melbourne, with the sentence confirmed in August 2019.
After 404 days in prison, Pell was released in April 2020, when the High Court of Australia, the country’s highest judicial body, overturned the sentence.
Lawyers for the prosecution, in the ongoing process in Australia for psychological damage and alleged sexual abuse, of which the cardinal was acquitted, said they would maintain the process against the Catholic Church.
Pell has always pleaded not guilty, but admitted he had not done enough to protect victims of Australian clergy sexual abuse.
A government commission that studied complaints of pedophilia within Australian institutions received some 4,500 complaints against more than 1,800 clergymen for sexual abuse committed in the country between 1985 and 2015 and determined, in 2017, that Pell “was aware” of the problem in church.
Source: TSF
