Australian cardinal links corruption to child abuse charges

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Cardinal George Pell has linked his fight against corruption in the Vatican with his prosecution in Australia for alleged child sex abuse.

Pell was regarded as the third highest-ranking Vatican official in 2018 when he became the world’s most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse. He served 13 months in prison before Australia’s High Court last week acquitted him of molesting two choirboys in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne while he was archbishop of Australia’s second-largest city in the 1990s.

Pope Francis’ former finance minister said in a television interview broadcast on Tuesday that some church officials believed he was prosecuted by Australian authorities because of the trouble he had caused in the Vatican in implementing financial reforms.

“Most of the senior people in Rome who are in any way sympathetic to financial reforms believe that they are” linked to the prosecution, the 78-year-old cleric told Sky News.

“What was surprising was even my theological opponents in Rome didn’t believe the stories” of sexual abuse, he added.

Pell said he did not have evidence of a link. But he suspected that a man who swore he had been sexually abused by Pell as a 13-year-old choirboy more than two decades ago had been “used.”

Francis created the Secretariat for the Economy, and named Pell its prefect, as a key part of his financial reform plans after being elected pope in 2013. Pell had tried to wrestle the Holy See’s opaque finances into order and align them with international standards, but his efforts and brusque style were rebuffed repeatedly by the Vatican’s old guard.

Pell stood aside from the job in 2017 to return to Australia, determined to clear himself of decades-old allegations of child...