LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Guardian
April 7, 2020
By David Marr
By the ultimate authority we recognise in this country, Pell was wrongly imprisoned. His supporters will vent but will Rome join his celebrations?
This is a mighty triumph not just for George Pell who is breathing free air for the first time in a year, and his backers who invested millions in his defence, but for the narrative of prejudice the church has spun all the years since the Melbourne police came for the cardinal in Rome.
The beleaguered church. The misunderstood church. The church under attack by secularists. The church pursued by abuse victims, police and journalists with axes to grind.
The unanimity of the court’s decision is crushing for Pell’s prosecutors and, of course, for the young man who brought this complaint to the police nearly five years ago. It has been such a long process for Pell’s accuser to reach this end.
From the start the contest was simple: who was to be believed here, the young man who said he was raped after mass in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral or the church witnesses assembled by Pell’s legal team who claimed it wasn’t possible.
The police, the prosecution authorities in Victoria, a jury and two judges of the court of appeal in Melbourne believed the young man. They realised it was hard for Pell to have raped that boy, but it was possible.
The high court has said: yes possible, but not reasonably possible.
Theirs was not a decision made at a lofty level of theory. As has been its practice lately, the high court dug right down into the evidence. The unanimous judgment delivered this morning involves more than a hundred paragraphs of meticulous reconstruction of the rituals of the cathedral, of doors opened and closed, of robes and processions.
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