It may be apocryphal, but there is enduring value in the story of the headline in a small antipodean newspaper that in the 19th century became agitated by events in Crimea: “We warn the Tsar.” The story came to mind late last year when the judicial system in the state of Victoria, Australia, attempted to suppress news that a senior Vatican figure, Cardinal George Pell, had been convicted of sexual offences against choirboys in Melbourne’s Saint Patrick’s cathedral between 1996 and 1997.

Although it had been known that Pell was being prosecuted, the precise charges had not been disclosed, and the trial had not been permitted to be reported while it was taking place. The reason for suppression had been concern that potential jurors for an expected second Pell trial, on separate abuse charges, might be prejudiced by public reports of the first. As it happened, not long after the first trial ended the second was abandoned due to evidentiary issues.

Pell was archbishop of Melbourne and later of Sydney, prior to his Vatican appointment. News of the guilty verdict quickly spread through social media and in mainstream media outside the state’s jurisdiction. It was always unrealistic to expect otherwise. In our digitised, globalised era, with every smartphone holder a potential publisher and broadcaster, news like this cannot be contained. Information sharing is today’s tsar.

The sexual abuse scandal is arguably the greatest crisis the Catholic church has faced since the Reformation, and the criminal conviction of such a senior cardinal was plainly a matter of weighty public interest. Open justice is at a premium in such cases because experience in several countries has been of sustained cover-up by church authorities of repeated crimes and breaches of trust by clergy. As the US supreme court once put it, “people in an open society do not demand infallibility from their institutions, but it is difficult for them to accept what they are prohibited from observing. When a criminal trial is conducted in the open, there is at least an opportunity both for understanding the system in general and its workings in a particular case.”

Newspaper front pages on 13 December 2018 refer to the suppression order.

Suppressing a case with world impact was naturally controversial. Although not naming Pell, local media complained about suppression orders and prominently told their audiences that the courts were preventing them reporting important news.

Last month, the Victorian legal system seemed to have had a rethink. The sentencing of Pell to six years’ imprisonment was televised with dignity, and the judge’s remarks, a model of clarity and carefully calibrated criminal justice, were published and widely reported. The judge said Pell was being punished for the specific crimes of which he had been found guilty and was “not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic church”.

Then, astonishingly, the state’s independent prosecution service launched proceedings for contempt of court against 36 local editors, journalists and media organisations, accusing them of aiding contempts by international media and of “scandalising the court” in relation to the Pell trial. Lawyers for the media defendants have sought more detail about what their clients are alleged to have done wrong.

Scandalising the court is a branch of contempt law directed at conduct that denigrates judges. The theory is that some criticism of judges is punishable because it tends to undermine public confidence in the legal system. More common in ages past, scandalising cases are rare now because, as one legal commentary puts it, the good sense of the community is a sufficient safeguard in curbing effects of undue criticism of judges.

If the prosecutions proceed, the Pell case will be a continuing illustration of an issue that runs far wider than Australia: how to adapt old legal doctrines to the realities of a new communications environment. Trying to bend the latter to the former seems to distort both. Policymakers are surely supple enough to find new ways to balance the necessary fairness and openness of criminal justice, particularly in high-profile cases.

• Paul Chadwick is the Guardian’s readers’ editor