The Vatican has reported that Cardinal George Pell passed away in Rome at the age of 81 due to complications from hip replacement surgery.
The Australian priest, a prominent conservative Roman Catholic and former top official at the Vatican, is said to have done the procedure satisfactorily and was conversing with his anesthesiologist when he suddenly slipped into cardiac arrest.
The doctors failed to revive him.
Only a few days have passed since he attended Pope Benedict’s burial in Rome.
Cardinal Pell, who retired from the position of Pope in 2013 at the age of 85 due to ill health, talked movingly about the Pope’s passing in his final interview.
‘I was very sad,’ Cardinal Pell said. ‘As a matter of fact, I was surprised how sad I was.
‘I knew he was sick and I knew he was dying.
‘[But] I was rather pleased as I thought I had heard he was rallying and was disconcerting the experts and going to live a little bit longer.
‘I’d known him well enough, admired what he was about. I thought he was very good for the church.
‘It was sad to see another wonderful stage in church history ending.’
Pell, the oldest Catholic in Australia, was ordained a priest in 1966, a bishop in 1987, and appointed the archbishops of Melbourne and Sydney before being named a cardinal in 2003.
From 2014 until he took a leave of absence in 2017 to go back to Australia to defend himself against allegations of sexual abuse, he served as the Vatican’s economy minister.
He was found guilty in 2018 of abusing two choirboys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in the 1990s while serving as the diocese’s archbishop.
He served 13 months in prison while continuously adclaiming his innocence till the Australian High Court overturned his conviction in 2020.
The case of the most senior figure accused in the global scandal of historical sex abuse that shook the Roman Catholic Church worldwide was concluded by the verdict that allowed the 78-year-old man to walk free.
