Cardinal George Pell’s enemies quietly accused him of having a child with a secret lover while living in his hometown in country Victoria during the 1970s

Cardinal George Pell’s enemies quietly accused him of having a child with a secret lover while living in his hometown in country Victoria during the 1970s. 

Daily Mail Australia can reveal Cardinal Pell’s enemies have long claimed he had a secret love child with a church employee while living in Ballarat as a young priest between 1973 and 1983. 

In 2014, three years before Australia’s most senior Catholic was charged with child abuse offences, reporters had been briefed by some of those enemies in the hope of bringing the Cardinal down. 

One of Australia’s top reporters at the time had searched the land looking for Cardinal Pell’s ‘illicit lover’, but she could not be found.     

Cardinal Pell died in Rome on Tuesday aged 81 after complications from hip replacement surgery.

He had been convicted in 2018 – and later cleared – of performing sex acts on choirboys in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996.

When Cardinal Pell was charged of the crimes in 2017, he was effectively running the Vatican’s finances, and was the most senior 강남안마방 figure in the church to ever be charged with sex crimes against children.    

Word of Cardinal Pell’s supposed relationship with the employee was passed onto the reporter, who asked not to be named, after he observed an intriguing omission by a Crown prosecutor’s opening summary in the 2014 case against notorious paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale. 

During that hearing, the court heard a clergyman had witnessed Ridsdale raping a young girl 40 years earlier. 

Cardinal Pell had shared a home with Ridsdale in the 1970s, accompanied him to court in 1993 and later offered to provide character evidence for him. 

‘It was really the first time Pell had been linked to any direct action and opened the doors to what really descended into a witch hunt,’ the reporter told Daily Mail Australia after the cardinal’s death.

<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS news" data-version="2" id="mol-fd323d10-9215-11ed-bd20-a96ae599112f" website George Pell was accused of having a secret love child