AUSTRALIA
Asian Correspondent
By Jo Lane | 14th July 2017
FEARS expressed by senior lawyers that Cardinal George Pell would not get a fair hearing on historic sexual offences were echoed within the Australian Catholic community this week when the nation’s highest-serving Catholic returned from Rome on Monday for his July 18 court appearance.
Pell has been serving as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy at the Vatican, the third most senior Catholic at the Vatican, and previously gave evidence in Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. He has strenuously denied the allegations that involve multiple complainants.
Asian Correspondent spoke to Catherine Smibert, a journalist who grew up in Pell’s hometown of Ballarat where he served as a priest from 1973 to 1983. Smibert was also employed by the Vatican media in Rome for eight years.
Speaking from her personal and working knowledge of Cardinal Pell she said, “I genuinely question the capacity for a fair trial.” She said he had been “persecuted unfairly” and the charges were “the grosses miscarriage of justice”.
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