My personal feelings about the late cardinal George Pell, buried last week, are unresolved, deeply private and still raw.

George Pell was a controversial figure for decades and was a staunch defender of the church. He repeatedly touted his credentials as a person to whom the sexual abuse of minors was an abhorrent scourge on the church.

He did so as a cover to divert attention away from his record as a man who waged a covert war on victims and survivors of abuse, and who orchestrated the church’s defence to my claim — the “Ellis defence”, by which I was figuratively hanged, drawn and quartered, displayed as a warning to any other survivor who may have the temerity to seek to sue the church.

It claimed: “there is no legal entity responsible for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church”.

Pell apologised to me for that legal abuse perpetrated by the…