Australian Cardinal George Pell, a leading Roman Catholic conservative and former top Vatican official who was acquitted of sexual abuse allegations in 2020, has died at age 81, his personal secretary said
Archbishop Peter Comensoli, the Archbishop of Melbourne, said Pell had died from heart complications following hip surgery.
Pell, a former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, served as Vatican as economy minister from 2014 until he took a leave of absence in 2017 to return to Australia to face the charges. Returning from Rome where he had been tasked with cleaning up the Vatican's finances, Pell denied the allegations but did not take the stand at two trials, the first of which ended with a hung jury. At the re-trial, a jury unanimously convicted him on five charges of assaulting two teenage choirboys at the cathedral when he was archbishop of Melbourne.
The son of an Anglican gold miner and a devout Irish Catholic mother, Pell was talented both academically and at sports. At 18, he landed a contract to play professional Australian Rules football and played in the reserves for a club, but later chose to enter the seminary.
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