George Pell AC (8 June 1941 – 10 January 2023) was an Australian Catholic cardinal. Between 2014 and 2019, he was the inaugural prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, and he was a member of the Council of Cardinal Advisers between 2013 and 2018.
He was ordained a priest in 1966 and a bishop in 1987 before being named a cardinal in 2003.
Pell was the eighth Archbishop of Sydney (2001-2014), the seventh Archbishop of Melbourne (1996-2001), and a Melbourne auxiliary bishop (1987–1996). He was also a columnist, author, and public speaker. Pell has maintained a high public profile on a variety of issues since 1996 while adhering to Catholic orthodoxy.
George Pell’s health: What illness did George Pell have?
Pell died of cardiac arrest on January 10, 2023, at the age of 81, at the Salvator Mundi hospital in Rome, following hip surgery.
Pell served as a priest in rural Victoria and in Melbourne, and he also chaired Caritas Australia (a branch of Caritas Internationalis) from 1988 to 1997.
He was appointed a delegate to the Australian Constitutional Convention in 1998, received the Australian government’s Centenary Medal in 2003, and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2005.
Pell established the “Melbourne Response” protocol in 1996 during his tenure as Archbishop of Melbourne to investigate and deal with complaints of child sexual abuse in the archdiocese.
The protocol was the first of its kind in the world, but it has received a number of criticisms.
