Cardinal Pell has been remanded in custody after his bail plea was revoked on 27 February.
The former Vatican treasurer and Australia’s most senior Catholic prelate will be sentenced on 13 March after he was found guilty in December of five charges related to the abuse of two 13-year-old boys while he was Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.
The 77-year-old Cardinal’s guilty verdict was revealed on Tuesday 26 February after a court suppression order was lifted.
Each of the five sentences of which Pell was found guilty carries a maximum of 10 years imprisonment.
At a sentence plea hearing at Melbourne’s county court on Wednesday, after which Pell’s defence team withdrew their application for bail, prosecutor Mark Gibson said Pell’s offending “warrants immediate imprisonment”. He described Pell as having a “degree of callous indifference”.
Pell’s lawyer, Robert Richter QC, tried to argue for a more lenient sentence, at one point claiming that it was “no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case” where the child did not willingly take part.
He also described an alleged attack where Pell is said to have grabbed one of the boys by the genitals as “fleeting”.
Judge Peter Kidd, the Guardian reports, dismissed these claims saying:
“Nothing is to be gained here by comparing different forms of sexual abuse of children. Of course I need to make a judgment of the overall gravity of this. But there is a limit to these kinds of comparisons.”
Richter also presented the judge with 10 character references, including one from former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard.
Two victim impact statements were presented to the hearing, one from the victim - who cannot be named - who testified in Pell’s trial and one from the father of the other victim who died in 2014. Neither were made public.
In a statement issued on Wednesday Archbishop Mark Coleridge, President of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, said that Pell’s conviction had “shocked” the bishops and many across Australia.
“The Bishops agree that everyone should be equal under the law, and we respect the Australian legal system. The same legal system that delivered the verdict will consider the appeal that the Cardinal’s legal team has lodged. Our hope, at all times, is that through this process, justice will be served,” the statement said.
It continued: “In the meantime, we pray for all those who have been abused and their loved ones, and we commit ourselves anew to doing everything possible to ensure that the Church is a safe place for all, especially the young and the vulnerable.”
In a separate statement, the Vatican said they agreed with Archbishop Coleridge’s statement.
“This is painful news that, as we are well aware, has shocked many people, not only in Australia. As already expressed on other occasions, we have the utmost respect for the Australian judicial authorities.
Out of this respect, we await the outcome of the appeals process, recalling that Cardinal Pell maintains his innocence and has the right to defend himself until the last stage of appeal.
While awaiting the definitive judgement, we unite ourselves with the Australian bishops in praying for all victims of abuse, and reaffirm our commitment to do everything possible so that the Church might be a safe home for all, especially for children and the most vulnerable.”
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