AUSTRALIA
The Daily Beast
February 25, 2019
By Barbie Latza Nadeau and Lachlan Cartwright
One jury found the Vatican’s No. 3 prelate guilty of sexually abusing boys, but prosecutors agreed to scrap a second trial on different charges.
Two months after Cardinal George Pell was convicted of sexually abusing boys, a judge has decided the Vatican’s third most powerful official will not face a second trial on similar charges in his home country of Australia.
The decision means that a suppression order that kept the proceedings shrouded in secrecy has been lifted and Pell, 77, will now be sentenced in the original case. Reporters who have attended the proceedings without being able to report them now say the court heard testimony that Pell forced one choir boy to perform oral sex on him after mass and that he masturbated in front the other victim while he groped and fondled him.
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