AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
March 13, 2019
Cardinal George Pell has been sentenced to six years’ jail for sexually abusing two choirboys when he was Catholic archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.
Pell, 77, was found guilty by a jury last December of sexually abusing the choirboys after a Sunday mass in December 1996 and then assaulting one of them a second time two months later.
The man who was once Australia’s most powerful Catholic sat in the dock dressed in a black shirt and a grey blazer, without a clerical collar, as County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd delivered his sentence.
The chief judge described Pell’s abuse of two choirboys in the sacristy at St Patrick’s Cathedral as “a brazen and forcible sexual attack on the victims”.
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