George Pell has arguably been Australia's most prominent religious figure over the past few decades, and one of its most controversial.
From a humble upbringing in country Victoria, George Pell rose to become Australia's highest-ranking Catholic and a key advisor to Pope Francis, while attracting criticism at home over his handling of church abuse scandals.
He later became the most senior Catholic figure to be jailed for child sexual offences, serving 13 months in jail before that conviction was quashed, with the High Court finding an innocent man may have been jailed.
Pell was born in the Victorian city of Ballarat in 1941 and excelled as a sportsman in his youth, playing for Richmond in the VFL Reserves as a teenager.
But his ambition lay not on the sporting field, but in the priesthood.
He began his studies into priesthood at Corpus Christi College in Werribee and later travelled to Rome to study at the Propaganda Fide College.
In 1966, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and began his work in the Ballarat Diocese — the start of a nearly-six decade career that would take him to the very heart of power in the Catholic Church.
In 1987, Pell became an Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Melbourne, working under Archbishop Sir Frank Little.
He took over the position of Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, under the appointment of Pope John Paul II and remained in this position until 2001, when he was elevated to the Metropolitan Archbishop of Sydney.
As Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, Pell established the Catholic Church's Melbourne Response, for addressing child sexual abuse claims.
Pell was a staunchly conservative figure at a time when calls were growing for the Catholic Church to become more progressive on issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the ordination of female priests.
"We're not a bit anti-women, but we're not in favour of women priests," he said as debate over the issue was renewed in the 1990s.
He also refused communion to gay activists at one of his masses and described homosexuality as "a much greater health hazard than smoking".
Catholic commentator and Catholic Church historian Paul Collins said Pell's "aggressive" defence of the church's traditions did not make him a popular figure among progressives.
"Unfortunately, I think Cardinal Pell took a kind of what I call a boots-and-all, a pretty aggressive stance toward society, and toward the teaching of the church," he said.
"For him, ultimately, the teaching of the church was the ultimate test. And he wasn't prepared to, as we say in the Australian idiom, to cop it sweet, from a secular society."
But Pell was also an advocate for Indigenous reconciliation and was a fierce critic of the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, which he called "mean and excessively harsh".
In 2005, Pell was recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours and was made a Companion in the Order of Australia for his service to the Catholic Church in Australia.
A steady rise to influence within the church
In 2003, Pope John Paul II appointed Pell to the College of Cardinals, joining just a handful of Australians to have been elevated to Cardinal over the past 150 years.
After the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, Pell travelled to Rome as the only Australian member of the Catholic Church with the right to vote for the new pope.
Pell was one of seven selected to advise Pope Francis on church reforms, aimed at making changes to the Curia which had been blamed for many of the scandals plaguing the church.
Pell felt the Curia, which is the administrative unit of the Holy See governing the Catholic Church, was in need of reform and he welcomed the opportunity to offer different perspectives.
"Most of the people who work in the Curia are fine people. There were one or two mishaps," he said.
"I think different perspectives will be useful and I think a few English-speaking perspectives won't hurt."
Pell's influence in the upper echelons of the church grew with his appointment in 2014 to oversee the Secretariat for the Economy, which effectively made him the Vatican's treasurer.
A controversial figure in the church
Pell was the first Catholic leader in Australia to address the sexual abuse scandals that had plagued the Church for decades.
He instigated a redress scheme called the Melbourne Response, which offered capped compensation payments of $50,000 to victims of sexual abuse at the hands of clergy.
"It's a matter of regret that the Catholic Church has taken some time to come to grips with the sex abuse issue adequately," he said as he launched the scheme in 1996.
The Melbourne Response proved controversial, with a former judge later recommending those in charge of the scheme sit outside of the Archbishop's power.
Pell attracted personal criticism for appearing to support fellow priest Gerald Ridsdale as he faced court in 1993 over sex offences for which Ridsdale was later convicted and jailed.
In 2020, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found Pell was explicitly told in 1982 that Ridsdale was being moved between parishes because he was abusing boys in his parish.
Pell rejected the finding and always claimed he had no knowledge of Ridsdale's offending prior to his conviction.
A high-profile conviction later quashed on appeal
In 2017, Pell himself was charged with historical sexual assault offences, and returned to Australia from Rome to face trial.
He was accused of abusing two choirboys in Melbourne in the 1990s.
A jury at his initial trial in 2018 was unable to reach a verdict and was discharged, with a second trial beginning several months later.
Later that year, he was found guilty of sexual penetration of a child under 16 but the conviction was not made public until after separate case against him was dropped.
Pell was sentenced to six years in jail, with a non-parole period of three years.
"I was too busy keeping control of myself. It was a blow and I just had to put up with it," he later said of the moment of his conviction.
An appeal against his conviction failed in 2019, but Pell took his appeal to the full bench of the High Court, which quashed his convictions and set him free.
In its summary, the High Court stated the Victorian Court of Appeal judges "failed to engage with the question of whether there remained a reasonable possibility that the offending had not taken place".
Upon his release from prison, Pell told columnist Andrew Bolt that he was a victim of culture wars.
"The culture wars are real. There is a systematic attempt to remove the Judaeo-Christian legal foundations, marriage, life, gender, sex," he said.
"There is less rational discussion and more playing the man."
