Cardinal George Pell chose his career over the safety of children

He was a company man. He did what he did to preserve the power and the assets of the church. If that meant thrashing H victims of abuse through the courts and boxing them into tiny settlements, that was fine by him.

- DAVID MARR

That's what made him the right man to clean up the Vatican's financial mess. High among the achievements for which he deserves praise was the work he and his accountants did to begin tracking the missing billions in the Holy City.

Soon after, he was in Melbourne facing a long purgatory in the criminal courts which ended in a unanimous acquittal by the high court. By that time, the so-called swimming pool charges had evaporated.

No Australian priest has ever climbed as high as George Pell. Few figures in the Catholic world have crashed so low. Pell was 56 years a priest; 18 years an archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney; a cardinal for 20 years and a prisoner for one.

He emerged with some grace. A martyr, his followers say, to the secular powers besieging the church. Senior priests who had once been wary of him began to speak of Pell with warmth. His acquittal will be celebrated by them all over again in coming weeks as a church victory.

This promising footballer was recruited to his mission in the 1950s. Pell had brains. He was probably right when he boasted he was the first Catholic priest since the Reformation to be given a doctorate at Oxford.