Australia’s highest ranking Roman Catholic Cardinal George Pell has been indicted by Australia Police on multiple counts of sexual assault. This brings the sex abuse scandal to the highest ranks of the Vatican.
Cardinal George Pell, 76, is chief financial adviser to Pope Francis and the highest ranking Vatican official to be charged in the church’s ongoing sex abuse scandal that goes back decades. Pell is due to appear in magistrate’s court in Melbourne, Australia, on July 18 for a hearing.
Pell is charged with multiple “historical sexual offenses,” which under Australian law are alleged offenses that happened some time ago.
Pell, who has taken a leave of absence from his duties at the Vatican, is expected to return to Australia to fight the charges. He has repeatedly denied all the allegations. A police spokesman said the cardinal has not and would not be treated any differently than anyone else in this investigation.
For years, Pell has faced allegations that he mishandled cases of clergy abuse when he was archbishop of Melbourne and, later, Sydney. His actions as archbishop came under tight scrutiny by the Australian Royal Commission tasked with investigating the scandal, which found high levels of abuse in the Australian Catholic Church. Seven percent of Catholic priests were accused of sexually abusing children over the last several decades. .
Pell himself acknowledged last year during his testimony to the commission that the Catholic Church had made “enormous mistakes” in allowing thousands of children to be raped and molested by priests. He conceded that he, too, had erred by often believing the priests over victims who alleged abuse. But more recently, Pell himself became the focus of a clergy sex abuse investigation.
While the Bible portrays the Catholic Church as full of spiritual abominations and apostasies, spiritual corruptions inevitably extend into practical crimes and abuse of innocent people. It is the “nature of the beast.”
“Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” Revelation 18:2.