AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
Joanne McCarthy
The Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis was always going to peak at the Vatican. The only surprise is it was an Australian who took it there.
Then again, we’re the only country in the world that’s held a national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Cardinal George Pell is Pope Francis’ prefect of the secretariat for the economy – in effect the reforming Pope’s chief financial headkicker who’s generally accepted as number three in the Vatican hierarchy – but he’s also the most senior Catholic cleric in the world to be charged with sex offences, as of Thursday.
Cardinal Pell works in the Vatican.
He lives just outside the Vatican’s 44 hectares of diplomatically-protected ground, and he’s there after Pope Francis controversially appointed him in February, 2014 before the cardinal’s first bruising encounter with the royal commission.
He’s stayed at the Vatican after – again, controversially – not returning to give evidence at a second public hearing in March last year for health reasons.
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