After a time, the novelty of seeing a cardinal in the witness box wears off. He is just a man under questioning. And it is an ordinary sight, at times so ordinary.

George Pell’s memory fails him like any other witness in trouble. He struggles to recollect his part in key events. The men he depended on to handle the complaint of John Ellis against ancient Father Aidan Duggan more than a decade ago were mistaken, muddled, insufficiently informed or plain wrong.

Yes, he made mistakes himself which he admitted in a muscular way and he agreed this case should never have turned into the hugely expensive court battle it became. But let this be clear to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse: it wasn’t His Eminence’s fault.

There are so many ways of saying yes and as Gail Furness SC, counsel assisting the commission, took him through his evidence, the cardinal used most of them: confident, breezy, grumpy, snarling and a perfunctory “Ahhah” through shut lips.

“Does ‘ahhah’ mean yes?” asked the commissioner, Justice Peter McClellan. It did.

Pell’s challenge is to convince the commission – or anyone – that he never knew back then how little money Ellis wanted. At one point, the case that would cost the church millions could have been settled for $100,000.

McClellan was frankly disbelieving: why not ask what Ellis was after before spending all this money on litigation? Pell blamed his chancellor, Brian Rayner, for not letting him know. But Rayer says he did, interjected Furness.

“It didn’t happen,” snapped Pell.

Victims and their advocates in the crowded gallery had listened politely enough until this. But as Pell reiterated his claims of ignorance a man called: “You should be ashamed of yourself, cardinal.” There was a burst of applause. “Please leave us,” said McClellan and the man was gone.

Pell was scrupulously polite. He looked the commissioners in the eye. He attended to the questions. But answering is not his usual mode, certainly not in public. He can never have been quizzed like this in his life.

He likes big ideas. Furness demanded small details. At times he reproached her for failures of logic: “In retrospect there are no musts!” She was undeterred.

The only mark of his ordeal was a pink flush, a particular clerical pink that came and went with the rhythm of the questioning.

“Do you know Latin, cardinal?” she asked.

“I do. I do.”

Old hands knew what was coming. We had been told many times Duggan had inscribed a Bible for Ellis. It was a crucial little piece of evidence but the words had never seen the light of day. How right to keep them under wraps until the cardinal was in the box.

With little hesitation Pell translated Duggan’s immaculate italics: “Before God I am your dearest friend.” Furness asked: “Would that cause you concern, a priest writing that to an altar boy?” It certainly did.

Ellis was sitting in the front row. He is a bony, intense man of gentle determination who has been through hell. He kept his head down over his documents, reading them so intently he might be seeing them for the first time.

He rarely looked at the man in a black suit half a dozen paces away.

Pell made brave admissions. He recognises the church’s immunity from claims by victims such as Ellis can’t continue. He’s not rolling over. He’s not suggesting all the old defences be given away. But he told the commission someone in the church has to stand up and be sued. And there has to be money there to pay successful claims.

Braver still was the cardinal’s recognition that the whole basis on which the church has been offering financial help to victims is flawed and has been from the start. McClellan asked: “What has been deemed appropriate so far doesn’t not meet the moral responsibility?”

“I would agree with that,” said Pell.

His voice was husky by then. There is a long way to go yet. We have barely begun to examine his role in the litigation that followed Ellis’s failed attempt to settle the matter under the church’s Towards Healing protocol.

The cardinal has signalled that here, too, he will blame others: “I asked very good lawyers to deal with it and left the running of the case to them.” Which is not what they’ve told the royal commission.

Pell starts work as the Prefect for the Economy in Rome on Monday. Before then he has a farewell bash given by the priests of his old archdiocese, a great mass, and perhaps two more days in the witness box.

It is the strangest procedure imaginable: a civil inquiry by a supreme court judge and a couple of fellow commissioners into the power of the Catholic church and the state of this man’s soul.