The only question on the agenda was how long the man who once bestrode the Catholic world will be living behind bars

'Take him away, please': George Pell hadn't dressed for prison, but that's where he went

The script was bare. “Take him away, please,” said Judge Peter Kidd at 3.10pm and Cardinal George Pell picked up his stick, nodded to the guards fore and aft and walked through a blank door at the end of the dock into the underworld.

Nothing his barrister, Robert Richter, argued could have saved Pell from this fate.

Everyone knew the cardinal was going down as soon as the barristers stopped talking. And they kept talking. For a few hours, their words kept Pell free.

The only question on the agenda today was how long the man who once bestrode the Catholic world will be living behind bars.

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It seems Kidd hasn’t warmed much to the cardinal in the eight months this case has been fought behind closed doors on the corner of William and Lonsdale streets, Melbourne.

“I want to make it plain I see this as a serious example of this level of offending,” Kidd told the court. “I see this as callous, brazen offending. Blatant. I think it did involve breach of trust, he did have in his mind some sense of impunity, how else did he think he was going to get away with this exploiting of two vulnerable boys. And there was an element of force here.”

Richter’s last efforts won his client little sympathy. Kidd squirmed, snapped his glasses off and on, leant forward, leant back, put his chin on his fist and kept saying, one way or another: “You’ve lost me Mr Richter.”

Richter never ceases complaining about the damage the press does his client yet all morning he threw headlines to the pack. The best of the worst: the crime at the heart of this case was “No more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating…”

On his last day of freedom Pell drew a crowded court. The world knew where to come and the place was packed. As always, the first on the scene were the Catholic women who turn out to every inquiry and trial to bear witness to the men and women destroyed and the children lost.

They are the implacable wounded.

Carmel Rafferty was waiting for the doors to open. She was sacked years ago for trying to save her pupils at Doveton Primary from crazed Father Peter Searson. With her was Judy Courtin who has shepherded a little army of victims through the courts. And by their side, a cup of coffee in her hand, Chrissie Foster, the mother of two daughters raped by Father Kevin O’Donnell. The cops used to say of O’Donnell: “He was a two-a-day man.”

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The women filled half the seats when the guards opened the doors. As they settled there was an end of term sense in the air. Break up was only hours away. Journalists took what seats they could find.

Sitting quietly up the front was Detective Chris Reed, the Victorian policeman who has pursued Pell for the last four years. His work was also on trial here.

Pell hadn’t dressed for prison. He wore the same clerical collar and black bib he always wore plus the cotton jacket which in another setting – on, say, the Amalfi Coast – would be the rig of a great cleric on holiday. Not today.

Two artists had turned up. We are forbidden to record a word or take photographs. Somehow that would bring the business of justice undone. But the ancient art of the court sketchers is still honoured by the courts. As the argument ground on, only they and the judge could look Pell in the face. It was clamped shut.

“I appear on behalf of the cardinal,” said Richter. It was hardly news. He cuts a Hogwarts figure. Fuzzy, old fashioned and lethal is the look he’s after.

Richter brought a slim file of character references to the court. “We would have had hundreds if we had cast the net wider,” Richter told Kidd. John Howard had written to commend George Pell. So had the law Professor Greg Craven already busy defending him in the Murdoch press.

But no Tony Abbott, the man who called Pell the greatest churchman in the land seems not to have been wanted on this occasion. Sad in its way.

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Richter’s job was to bring down the bidding. The prosecutor, Mark Gibson, had set the upper limit at 10 years for each of the five counts of which Pell has been found guilty. It’s an impossible total. But how low could Richter persuade the court to go?

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Pell doesn’t concede anything at all happened in the sacristy that day. So his lawyers were in the strange position of arguing what prison sentence might be appropriate for acts Pell claims never happened. The exercise for them is a grim hypothetical.

But did it help Pell to argue that the crime – if it happened – was a spur of the moment thing? There was no plotting, said Richter. No grooming. It was Pell, “stumbling on something without time for reflection”.

Kidd stopped him. “People don’t go ahead and do what he did without thinking about it. It may have been only a few seconds but people made choices and he did that and he continued to make choices over five minutes.”

Richter shifted ground. Pell was not, as he put his penis in that boy’s mouth, acting as archbishop but only as a man. Mass had finished and that was the only reason Pell was at St Patrick’s.

“The only differential of power is that he is an adult – for reasons inexplicable – with an urge to do what he did,” said Richter. “He is not abusing his position as archbishop but he is abusing his position … as a grown man.”

Kidd was not impressed.

It got worse. Richter pointed out helpfully that (if Pell had in fact done anything at all) he exerted “No force greater than was required to achieve penetration.” There were no physical injuries, no ejaculation, no recording of the offences and he did not commit them while on bail or parole.

“So what if he wasn’t on bail or parole,” asked Kidd. “If he was on bail or parole he wouldn’t be the archbishop of Melbourne.”

The gallery was polite. Only occasionally were there gasps and laughter.

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Richter ended with a burst of praise for a man who has lived “a life of service, kindness and generosity above and beyond that of a priest”. He commended Pell’s “private not his bureaucratic character”. He praised him as “A man of compassion, a man who relates to everyone from prime ministers to street cleaners.”

He begged Kidd not to punish his client for the sins of the Catholic church and Kidd replied: “From where I am sitting the Catholic church is not on trial and I am not imposing a sentence on the Catholic church. I am imposing a sentence on Cardinal Pell for what he did.”

Pell was sent through the door to the cells. Kidd made his own exit, his robes gathered around him and a look like death on his face. Helicopters hovered overhead with cameras hoping for a shot of Pell in a prison van.

We will see him again when the appeal begins, the grounds already being argued on the front pages of the papers. The lawyer Father Frank Brennan’s defence of the cardinal in the Australian is being distributed to parents with kids at Catholic schools. How might a fair jury be empaneled if these attacks on the victim, the jury and the court continue month after month.

By then Pell will be in one of the prisons where Victoria houses paedophiles. He will know so many of the faces, so many priests and brothers who have done what he continues to deny having done himself. What reunions there will be.

For the first time since they shared the St Alipius presbytery at Ballarat in the 1970s, George Pell will be back under the same roof as the worst of the worst. He and Gerald Ridsdale will have so much to catch up on.