One of the pope's top advisers, Cardinal George Pell, makes his first court appearance in Australia this week on charges of historic sex crimes, a bitter reminder for his home town reeling from more than a dozen abuse cases. Pell, the Vatican's economy minister, last month became the most senior Catholic to be charged with sex crimes. He has vowed to fight the still-unspecified charges, calling them false and the result of a "relentlelss character assassination". Before a 2013 state government inquiry into institutional abuse, Ballarat was best known to Australians as the site of the Eureka Stockade, a bloody 1854 uprising by goldminers against colonial authorities. "I can't see any reason that he won't get a fair and just trial," said abuse survivor Philip Nagle, an agronomist.

Source: The Star July 25, 2017 13:41 UTC