Cardinal Pell … Well, Well, Well …

The slow martyrdom of Cardinal George Pell began in Australia but ended in Rome on January 10, 2023. His resurrection continues from the ash heap of his good name.

January 7, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

Cardinal George Pell passed from this life unexpectedly on January 10, 2023. The official cause of death was a cardiac arrest in a Rome hospital after routine surgery for a hip replacement. His death came as a great shock to the many people around the world who prayed and worked for his release from prison on false charges of sexual abuse dating back decades. The false charges were exposed, and his wrongful conviction disposed of in a unanimous decision of the seven members of Australia’s highest court on Tuesday of Holy Week in 2020.

As I did every year for the life of this blog, I wrote a Holy Week post in 2020 that was published on the day after Cardinal Pell’s exoneration. My Holy Week post then was “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.” Only later did I see connections in the symbolism within that post and what had been going on in Australia and Rome in regard to accusations against Cardinal Pell at that time. I never consciously intended the connection, but on the day previous to its publishing, Pell emerged from his darkness into a brighter Australian light. At the end of that same month, on April 29, 2020, I published “From Down Under, The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

There were some in Australia who refused to accept the findings of the High Court even though there was never any credible evidence against Pell. Some suggested that even if innocent, he should remain in prison to atone for the sins of other priests. One Australian commenter wrote on the Australia Wrongful Convictions Report site: “Why not just drop the Pell case? It is controversial. Besides, he is deceased. I suspect Pell is guilty.” So, in the eyes of some in Australia and beyond, actual evidence of guilt, or the lack thereof, means nothing. Guilt or innocence is purely an emotional affair depending upon the whims or prejudice of any person following the case. So why have trials, and why have appeals? It is a tragedy that Cardinal Pell spent 405 days in an Australia prison having his evidence-free guilt affirmed by two appellate courts before one, the Highest Court, came unanimously to its senses. And still, some in Australia would not accept that conclusion. It was left to the rest of the world to conclude that prejudice has a secure home Down Under. To its great credit, the Australia-based Wrongful Convictions Report courageously took up the High Court’s finding and reported on it justly. In “Week of Pell’s ‘Resurrection’” marking the first anniversary of Pell’s death, Andrew L. Urban, moderator of Wrongful Convictions Report, wrote

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Within the space of a couple of days this week, several voices were heard in the public square ‘resurrecting’ the late Cardinal Pell, dismissing the notion that he was guilty of sexual abuse, a notion that some maintained even after the High Court’s 7-0 decision to quash that conviction. 

On the first anniversary of Cardinal Pell’s death in Rome, this extraordinary case continues to make ripples in the law and society. In the law, it is prompting yet another call for the establishment of a Criminal Cases Review Commission. In society it is challenging those whose animosity and antagonism against Pell remain firmly in place, defying the High Court’s decision, referring to the verdict a result of a jury not “acting rationally.” It also brings to the forefront the conviction in December 2023 of Pell’s Vatican adversary, Cardinal Becciu on charges of embezzlement and money laundering.

On Friday, January 12, 2024 in Australia:

Former High Court justice ­Michael Kirby has described a new edition of Gerard Henderson’s book, Cardinal Pell, The Media Pile On & Collective Guilt, as “an important contribution to the efforts to establish a Criminal Cases Review Commission” in Australia.

Mr Kirby said basic evidence in the case showed “a very serious doubt was raised as to Cardinal Pell’s guilt”, adding: “Effective protections against miscarriages of justice must be there for all serious cases, even for a cardinal.”

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, marked the first anniversary of Pell’s death in Rome of a heart attack after hip surgery with the strongest Church statements yet about the Cardinal’s charges, conviction and imprisonment on sexual abuse charges and his later “unanimous High Court exoneration”.

At St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney on Wednesday, Archbishop Fisher said: “Following a media, political and police witch hunt, Cardinal Pell was tried and im­prisoned for crimes he did not commit. Even after he was unanimously exonerated by the High Court he continued to be demonized by some.”

Archbishop Fisher told The Australian: “The Pell case was a serious miscarriage of justice. So far there has been no inquiry into the actions of the police or how the legal system managed to get this so wrong. Perhaps worst of all, there seems to be no mood in Victoria for a serious inquiry into the justice system.”

The Australian also reports that “A separate telephone tap has also revealed a conversation in which one person tells another ‘the highway is open to you’ after Pell was charged. Vatican investigators have been told money was sent to Australia to adversely affect the case against the Cardinal.”

On Wednesday January 10, 2024 in America:

Wrongfully convicted Fr Gordon J. MacRae writes from his prison cell in New Hampshire:

 The case against Cardinal George Pell was …. influenced by nefarious machinations, including police and prosecutor corruption.  This was at the heart of a curious incident related in Prison Journal  (Volume 1, p. 329).  At a pretrial hearing on Cardinal Pell’s false sexual abuse charges, among the most difficult charges to defend against, a Melbourne, Australia priest who was present in the court told Pell’s supporters that he prays that the prosecutor will “mess up his presentation.”  When that actually happened, the priest reportedly said, “See, my prayers are working!”  When Cardinal Pell was told of this he said, “I would have much preferred that he prayed for justice to be done.”

Those were the spontaneous words of an innocent man who believed that justice in this life is possible — even likely.  The guilty on the other hand engage in any number of contrived machinations to do an end run around the law.  When a defendant is innocent and there is no evidence supporting the charge, it is too often police and prosecutors who resort to machinations to do an end run around the law.

There is a vivid example of this on the same page of Pell’s Prison Journal  cited above.  Detective Sgt. Kevin Carson of the Ballarat, Australia Police Department produced a report claiming that sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Victoria — where Pell was facing trial — was responsible for forty-three suicides.  After the shocking story was leaked to tabloid media, a parliamentary inquiry into the Church’s handling of sexual abuse was launched.  An inquiry is similar to a grand jury report in the United States.

The police set up an investigation, but were able to identify only twenty-five of the forty-three named by Detective Carson.  Of those twenty-five names, only sixteen had committed suicide.  But only one of the sixteen had been assaulted by a member of the clergy.  As Pell himself pointed out, “One is one too many, but one is not  forty-three.”  This tendency to “heighten the hype” lends itself to unfair trials and wrongful convictions, but it also lends itself to career advancement, a shamefully strong force in many of the U.S. grand jury reports on Catholic clergy.

In his analysis of the Cardinal Becciu trial in The Wall Street Journal  …, Francis X. Rocca included the following paragraph:

“Around that time, [Pope] Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers.  Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican.  But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external auditing firm.  Pell considered [Cardinal] Becciu his main opponent ….  Other Vatican officials also lobbied the Pope against Pell’s changes.  The Pope curtailed Pell’s powers and the external audit was cancelled.  Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges.  He was acquitted on appeal and died”  [on January 10, 2023].

In an October 15, 2023 published commentary on Mr. Rocca’s account in The Wall Street Journal, [Father MacRae] added some further context to the story:

“The part of this nebulous story that most troubles me is the decision of the Pope to listen to Cardinal Becciu and other Vatican officials who lobbied against Cardinal George Pell’s financial reforms even after [ the Pope] had empowered him to reform Vatican finances.  Mr. Rocca does not speculate on the source of charges against Cardinal Pell in Australia — charges for which he was exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s High Court.  This was after he wrongly spent 400 days in prison.  There are many who believe that there may have been a connection between these false charges and Cardinal Pell’s attempted reforms of Vatican finances.  Pell himself suspected this.”

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— “Week of Pell’s ‘Resurrection’” by Andrew L. Urban

Cardinal Pell, Post-Resurrection

His Eminence Cardinal George Pell, served just over 400 days and nights in an Australian prison before justice finally awakened and sanity finally set in. His guilty verdict was upheld in two attempts at appeal leaving people of just heart and mind around the world scratching their heads. I wrote an early post on this case from the point of view of someone for whom justice had also evaporated into mindless prejudice. My post was “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia.”

On the day I write this, I mark 11,051 days in a U.S. prison for crimes that never took place. I do not know if Cardinal Pell was pressured into accepting a deal, but a deal presented to me was that I could leave prison in one year if I plead guilty. I refused the deal. I do not write this as a comparison of our woes. The number of days does not matter. Anything beyond a single day of wrongful imprisonment for fictitious crimes is, as Catholic League President Bill Donohue described it, a Travesty of Justice.

I rejoiced as justice and freedom were restored to Cardinal Pell, but the insults against him were not over. On January 10, 2023 he died from a heart attack after routine hip-replacement surgery. His body was returned to Australia for interment, and upon arrival it was discovered that some postmortem wounds were mysteriously inflicted upon his body. This magnified our grief, which may actually have been the point. This has never been explained.

But the final words on Cardinal Pell were not the lies of his detractors. It was one of the proudest moments of my life as a priest to learn that while I was writing about Pell from my prison cell in New Hampshire, he was simultaneously writing about me from his prison cell half a world away in Australia. The following excerpts are from his magnificent spiritual biography from the darkest days of his life. These excerpts are from his Prison Journal Volume 2 written in the dark days between his failed appeals and the final awakening of Australia’s High Court. These excerpts, played a small role in restoring his freedom. Today they also play a role in restoring mine:

Source: Prison Journal Volume 2, pp 57-60, Ignatius Press 2021, Entry of Friday, 2 August 2019:

“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog Beyond These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australian media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’ Fr MacRae recounts the extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windschuttle, editor of the quality journal, Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ [See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell.’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019].

“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in April, 2015]. Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019.

“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from BTSW ‘About’],

‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’”

— George Cardinal Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 57-60

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EPILOGUE BY FATHER GORDON MACRAE

There is a background story about the origin of the false charges against Cardinal Pell. It came out of the United States when a young con man was allowed to use a pseudonym, Billy Doe, to bring phony charges against several Catholic priests, one of whom died in prison. The story was propelled forward by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine. It has been exposed as fraudulent, including here at Beyond These Stone Walls in “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”

Thank you for reading, pondering, and sharing this important story. I have known many priests who have been falsely accused. In some of those cases the accusations fell apart and the heavy burden of false witness was removed from the nightmarish existence of those priests. Many were so scarred by the current process of American bishops that presumed the guilt of any priest accused and then banished them instantly from any ministry and even from living on any Church property. Once relieved from the burden of false witness most of these priests simply remained in silent exile rather than risk ever becoming targets again.

It was not so for Cardinal Pell. With his life and freedom restored he returned to Rome and spoke in every forum that would welcome him about the ordeal he endured and about what could make such an unjust situation more just. He wrote a letter to me in prison assuring me of his deeply felt concern and fraternal support. He wrote of his resolve to raise my case in Rome at every opportunity.

But he never got the chance. He died unexpectedly during routine hip surgery at a Rome hospital on January 10, 2023. Three days earlier on January 7, 2023 he preached his last homily to the Caritas in Veritates — Magnificat Dominium Community at San Giovanni Rotondo. That homily is our feature this week at Voices from Beyond.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”