Christian fidelity's cost: how Cardinal Pell was betrayed by the Church and land he loved - Catholic Herald

For those alive today, the legacy of George Pell will be forever marked by, or even defined by, the travesty of justice he endured at the hands of the legal system in the Australian state of Victoria. Victoria was Pell’s home state, and the appalling treatment he suffered there should alert us to a little-acknowledged element in the reality of his adult life: for all his eminence and rank, he was largely an outsider. To many in both his homes, the Church and Australia, the courage of Pell’s convictions was at the very least unsettling. Many did not want to hear him.
Indeed, there seemed generally to be something of Georgius contra mundum about him, and Pell often found himself if not lonely then isolated. Arguably this was most obvious in his Vatican appointment to the Secretariat of the Economy by Pope Francis in 2014. In line with his avowed mission to reform the papal curia, Francis appointed a man whom he surely knew was principled yet experienced in the realities of ecclesiastical …