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The colossus of Australia’s conservative Catholicism, Cardinal George Pell, has died at the age of 81.
What happened to George Pell?
Melbourne Archbishop Peter Comensoli said Pell died of heart complications following hip surgery. “It is with great sadness that the news breaks that Cardinal George Pell passed away a few hours ago, from cardiac complications following hip surgery,” he said.
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“May everlasting light be to him now, who believed so firmly in the God of Jesus Christ?” His death came a few days after he attended the funeral of former Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.
Cause of death of George Pell
George Pell died of cardiac arrest at the Salvator Mundi hospital in Rome following hip surgery on January 10, 2023, at the age of 81. Plans were made to return Pell’s remains to Australia and bury him at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney after the Vatican burial of him.
He suffered from many health problems in recent years. She had been talking to the anesthetist at the hospital after the procedure when she reportedly suddenly went into cardiac arrest.
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George Pell disease
Pell developed heart problems in January 2010 when he visited the Vatican, and in February had a pacemaker implanted in his chest at a Rome hospital. She was unable to fly from Italy to Australia in 2015 because her doctors determined her heart condition was too serious for her to testify before the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
In February 2016, it was anticipated that he would be healthy enough to travel. However, based on a two-page medical evaluation provided by Pell’s lawyers, the committee’s chairman, Judge Peter McClellan, barred him from testifying in person. He gave his testimony via video link from a hotel in Rome. He underwent knee surgery in December of last year. By June 2019, he had healed enough that he no longer needed a cane.
In February 2019, when he was detained after his conviction, an assessment of his mental and physical health concluded that he was healthy enough to remain in HM Melbourne Assessment Prison.
Early career of George Pell
In his early years as a priest, Pell served at Swan Hill, Ballarat, and Melbourne. Gerald Ridsdale, a known child molester, was someone he met during his 1973 term at St. Alipius Presbytery in Ballarat East.
For the three decades of sexual assaults on more than 71 children, that ex-Catholic priest is still in jail. When Ridsdale pleaded guilty to 13 additional charges related to the assault of two children in 1981 and 1982, the most recent ones were made public in October 2022.
He has served 39 years of his full sentence for crimes committed over a long period. Pell consistently denied being aware of Ridsdale’s child abuse in the 1970s.
George Pell’s Social Issues
Cardinal George Pell rose from a childhood in Victorian country to become one of the world’s highest-ranking Catholic clerics before sexual assault allegations embroiled him in multiple court cases.
A divisive figure, Pell had spent the last few years of his life living in the Archdiocese of Sydney, which he once presided over as Archbishop of Sydney, after his conviction for child sex offenses was unanimously overturned by the High Court in April 2020.
Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic cleric has always maintained his innocence, despite a jury finding him guilty on December 11, 2018 of the 1996 rape of a 13-year-old boy and sexual assault of another at the Cathedral of Saint Patrick, while he was Archbishop. from Melbourne.
He had been sentenced to six years, with a minimum of three years and eight months. In 2020, the High Court overturned the conviction and he was released from prison.
George Pell has an estimate Net worth of $1 million dollars.
