DENVER (CO)
Crux
April 7, 2020
By John L. Allen Jr.
Rome – Obviously, the primary beneficiary of Tuesday’s decision by Australia’s High Court to overturn the sexual abuse conviction of Cardinal George Pell is Pell himself. The 78-year-old prelate was definitively acquitted and is now a free man after more than 400 days in prison, mostly in solitary confinement.
For all those presently chafing after a few weeks of a coronavirus quarantine, Pell’s forced isolation for a much longer stretch, and in much less pleasant conditions, may help put things in perspective.
A close second in terms of who benefits from the ruling, however, is the Vatican, which effectively got an early Easter present.
Had things gone the other way, the Vatican would have been compelled to launch its own canonical investigation of Pell, which could have led to his being expelled from the clerical state like ex-cardinal and ex-priest Theodore McCarrick. Judges in Rome would have had to examine the evidence, and likely would have reached the same decision as their Australian colleagues, which was that “the jury, acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a doubt as to the applicant’s guilt.”
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