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Article snippet: SYDNEY — When more than a dozen sexual abuse victims from Cardinal George Pell’s hometown in Vatican action. As they spoke, the victims said, Cardinal Pell remained stiff, eyes downcast. Then Andrew Collins, whose family had been close to Cardinal Pell for years, gave him a hug. The cardinal seemed to soften and later delivered an emotional statement promising to help. “But that never happened,” Mr. Collins said. “I’ve had four survivors that I’ve known personally take their own lives this year.” “That was part of what we were trying to get through to people in Rome,” he said. “We need help and assistance.” This week, Cardinal Pell, 76, became the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate to be formally charged with sexual offenses, decades into a wide-reaching international abuse scandal. The question now for the victims of Ballarat, and for Catholic faithful everywhere, is not just whether George Pell, native son of an Australian mining town, is guilty and will be convicted, it’s also how he rose to the pinnacle of power at the Vatican even as a cloud of scandal trailed him. The charges this week that the cardinal himself was involved in sexual offenses followed years of criticism that he had at best overlooked, and at worst covered up, the widespread abuse of children by clergymen in Australia. An investigation by the Australian Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse concluded that 7 percent of Catholic priests in Australia had been a... Link to the full article to read more