Cardinal George Pell has returned to Rome today and it has been years after the terrible accusation made against him. He again found his way to the ancient city of Rome for the first time after he was released from all the charges of child sexual assaults.
A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Sydney reported that flew out of Sydney today and visited Rome but his duration of stay is still unknown. The purpose of the visit is yet not clear.
Cardinal Pell was leading the Secretariat of State in order to reform the Vatican’s finances but everything came to stop when he was asked for trials with the charges against child sexual abuse in 2017.
Australian media reported today that the 79 years-old ex-Vatican treasurer planned to fly out on Tuesday.
The juror of Australia’s Court voted for his acquittal in April and quashed him from all the guilt. He spent more than a year in jail.
The cleric left the Vatican in 2017 to fight the charges in his home state of Victoria. He was accused of sexually misconducting with two choir boys in the late 1990s and was sentenced to six years in jail.
“He always intended to return to Rome,” his friend Katrina Lee, from the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, told Reuters news agency.
This time, he was in the prison for 13 months before the judge released him from all the guilt he was convicted of.
After the acquittal, he had been living in Sydney until the reporters confirmed his advent in Rome by Tuesday.
Christopher Lamb is the Rome correspondent for Catholic news publication The Tablet and said all eyes would be on Cardinal Pell as he arrived in Rome.
Lamb told the reporters that the Cardinal got a number of supporters from the crowd in Rome and it wouldn’t be easy to break the faith of his loyal followers.
“There will be a number of them who will be delighted to see him return,” said Lamb. People were always cynical about all the convictions that made him a convicted soul.
He added, “However there will be others who will be concerned about the optics of a return by Cardinal Pell to Rome and the Vatican … particularly if the cardinal has a meeting, an audience, with Pope Francis.”
Vatican correspondent Joshua McElwee reported that he was not a part of the Vatican and his reasons for his return were not yet clear to the reporters.
“At the moment he has no official role here,” McElwee said.
He might be back for his organizing his personal arrangements like restoring some personal items or to clean up his old apartment.
He added, “I don’t know what else he would be doing other than those kinds of things.”
It gets twisted all of a sudden because Cardinal Pell decided to come around just after the resignation of Cardinal Angelo Becciu who has been implicated in allegations of financial misconduct at the Vatican.
