Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux and Cardinal Pell

Cardinal George Pell is enjoying his first days of freedom at a Carmelite monastery in a Melbourne suburb after serving 409 days in solitary confinement for a crime of which the Australian High Court has now unanimously ruled he was wrongly convicted.

In a judgment delivered on Tuesday, the court of seven justices overturned decisions by two lower courts that had sentenced him to six years in prison, concluding that the Vatican’s former prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy had been convicted on evidence that “did not establish” the “requisite standard of proof” of guilt.



Kerry  Myers / CC BY

Such a unanimous verdict is very rare for the country’s highest court.

Cardinal Pell, 78, was jailed in February 2019 based on the testimony of a man who accused the cardinal of assaulting him and a fellow choirboy at Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the 1990s. The other choirboy withdrew his allegations before his death.

In a statement, Cardinal Pell said he bore no ill will toward his accuser and did not want his acquittal to add to the bitterness in the community.

Cardinal Pell has a special devotion to St Thérèse. Providentially, the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux and her parents – St Louis and Zélie Martin – have arrived in Melbourne and will reside during Holy Week at the Carmelite Monastery in Kew, which is the national shrine for St Therese of Lisieux during Holy Week.

Totus tuus ego sum 

Et omnia mea tua sunt;

Tecum semper tutus sum:
Ad Jesum per Mariam