Cardinal George Pell’s final bid to overturn his convictions for child sexual abuse has begun hearings in Australia’s top court.
The ex-Vatican treasurer is serving a six-year jail sentence after a jury found he abused two boys in a Melbourne cathedral in the 1990s.
Pell is the most senior Catholic priest ever to be found guilty of such crimes.
He is seeking to challenge the verdict by arguing that the jury did not properly consider all evidence.
The Australian cleric, 78, has maintained his innocence since he was charged by police in June 2017.
The case in the High Court of Australia is Pell’s last avenue of appeal, after a lower court rejected his first bid to quash the verdict last year.
The conviction has rocked the Catholic Church, where Pell had been one of the Pope’s most senior advisers.
The Vatican has been under pressure to defrock the cleric, but it has maintained he deserves a full and fair legal process.
In December 2018, a jury unanimously found Pell guilty of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choir boys in private rooms in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Pell was archbishop of Melbourne at the time.
The convictions included one count of sexual penetration and four counts of committing indecent acts.
Pell’s trial heard testimony from the only surviving victim. The abuse was not witnessed by anyone else, but the trial also heard evidence from dozens of churchgoers.
In sentencing Pell in 2019, Judge Peter Kidd said the cleric had committed “a brazen and forcible sexual attack on the two victims”.
