Cardinal Pell gets 6 years for abusing 2 choirboys

Australian Cardinal George Pell, the former Vatican treasurer, has been handed a six-year prison sentence for sexually abusing two choirboys in the mid 1990s, one of whom later died of a heroin overdose.

Pell was found guilty in December after a five-week trial of one count of sexual penetration of a child and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child.

A jury ruled last year that Pell abused two 13-year-old choir boys in Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral, following Mass in December 1996 and early 1997.

The verdict was withheld from the public until a legal suppression order was lifted last month. It made Pell, 77, the most senior figure in the Church to be charged with a sex crime.

His hearing was broadcast live around the world on March 13 from Victoria’s County Court in central Melbourne, the city where Pell formerly served as archbishop and committed the crimes.

However, Pell maintains he is innocent and has lodged an appeal. His appeal hearing has been set for June 7-8, which critics claim is unfair as most inmates usually have to wait a year or longer before their challenging of a court verdict is heard.

The chief judge described his abuse of the two teenagers in the sacristy of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as “a brazen and forcible sexual attack on the victims,” ABC News reports.

"Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance," said Judge Peter Kidd.

“There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other,” he said.

"You were the Archbishop of St Patrick's Cathedral - no less - and you sexually abused two choir boys within that cathedral," Kidd told the County Court of Victoria. "You even told your victims to be quiet because they were crying."

The judge said he had considered Pell's age and health in determining the jail term and added that Pell should not "be made a scapegoat" for the failings of the Catholic Church.

Pell will be eligible for parole after three years and eight months.

Reactions both inside and outside the courtroom were mixed, with some survivors of clerical sex abuse reportedly saying, “even a week would have been enough” while others chided the ruling as too lenient.

The surviving schoolboy who was abused by the prelate said in a statement provided by his lawyer that “there is no rest for me … I’m doing my best to hold myself and my family together.”

Seven percent of all Catholic priests in the country abused children over the past six decades, according to statistics released in 2017 by Australia’s Royal Commission into Responses to Institutional Child Sex Abuse.

Pell is the highest-ranking Catholic Church official in the world to face such criminal charges and the first to be convicted.

He was ordained a priest in 1966 and made an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne in 1987.

In 1996 he became the Archbishop of Melbourne and was transferred to Sydney Archdiocese in 2001.

In February 2014 Pope Francis appointed him to the Secretariat for the Economy at the Vatican.

Cardinal Pell was on leave of absence from his post as prefect of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy to return to Australia to face the charges.

His five-year term as prefect of that secretariat came to an end on Feb. 24, the last day of the three-day summit on abuse of minors that Pope Francis held at the Vatican with presidents of the world's national episcopal conferences. Cardinal Pell was no longer prefect of the secretariat.