Acquitted Cardinal George Pell Lied About What He Knew of Clerical Sex Abuse, Report Says
Cardinal George Pell, the former Vatican treasurer who was released from prison in April after winning an appeal on his clerical sex-abuse conviction, lied about what he knew about abusive priests, according to unredacted parts of a report by an Australian commission investigating the matter.
The lengthy Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Assault report—produced during the investigation of the Diocese of Ballarat, the Archdiocese of Melbourne, and the Australian church’s protocols to address assault claims—was released in 2017, but all segments pertaining to Pell had been blacked out to protect the cardinal against prejudice in his own clerical sex-abuse trial. Pell was convicted of clerical sex abuse in 2018 and served 13 months in prison before his release in early April by an appellate court.
Three of the previously redacted reports, all of which included testimony Pell gave from Rome in 2015, were released on the commission’s website Thursday now that his trial has definitively concluded.
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