AUSTRALIA
The New Daily
Lucie Morris-Marr
It wasn’t the way Cardinal George Pell likes to start his morning.
On a normal weekday the 76-year-old is usually found working inside the grand confines of Saint John’s Tower on the western tip of Vatican City.
In the medieval building, the official seat of the office he holds as Prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy, there are assistants to bring him coffee or run errands across the ancient Roman cobblestones.
The restored tower is a place he can work in peace.
On Wednesday, however, there was nothing peaceful about the scene that greeted Cardinal Pell at Melbourne Magistrates Court, where he arrived just before 9am for his first hearing on multiple charges of historic sexual abuse.
This reporter had been the first in line at the doors of the court in the darkness at 5am. But very soon the William Street building was under siege, with an unprecedented media army of over 150 local, national and international journalists and TV crews.
We all morphed into one huge, breathless, heaving and agitated pack.
In truth, we were hungry for breakfast as well as the story.
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