Cardinal Pell, aged 81, died in January 2023 in Rome after a cardiac arrest following a routine hip replacement operation. His funeral was held four days later at St Peter's Basilica.

The funeral was notable for the absence of a traditional open casket, which reportedly surprised Vatican officials.

Recent reports in The Australian suggest that Pell's body was left in disarray after an autopsy, with his clothes haphazardly placed in the coffin, his body not properly dressed and without shoes.

Final insult

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, citing a conversation with Pell's brother, revealed that the cardinal's nose was broken upon the body's return to Australia, describing it as a "final insult".

Bolt speculated that the mistreatment might have stemmed from either incompetence or lingering animosity within the Vatican.

"Pell once told me he did not feel safe in the Vatican as he chased the crooks" Bolt stated. "What was done to his body makes me suspect he was right."

Pell a 'ticking time bomb'

However Pell's brother David told The Australian that the family has no issue with George Pell's medical treatment in Rome.

David Pell said George Pell had several serious heart conditions that dated back to the 1990s. He described the cardinal as a "ticking time bomb".

David Pell explained the condition of George Pell's body, saying that he was vested but in an incorrect sequence.

He suggested the Cardinal's nose could have been broken by the lid of his tight fitting coffin which was lined with zinc or, as one medico suggested, that the Cardinal's nose could have been damaged by hospital tubes while nursing staff were trying to revive him.

David Pell said that there was no room for the Cardinal's size 14 shoes to be put on him, but that they were in the coffin.

He said the family decided the coffin not be open at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney because the embalming "was not up to scratch" and by the time of the Sydney funeral his brother would have been dead for three weeks.

David Pell told the Australian that, while a number of his brother's friends urged him to return to Australia for his hip replacement, the family had no say.

"The big boy made up his mind" he said,

Sources

Daily Mail

The Australian

Herald Sun

The Australian

CathNews New Zealand

Bolt, a self-confessed agnostic, also labels reports as "anti-Catholic" and a "witch hunt."

In his Thursday piece to air on The Bolt Report, Bolt accuses the ABC of misleading people not just by what it reports but, more importantly, by what it leaves out.

Bolt says both the ABC and The Age organisations have ignored the facts of the events, and he is asking why.

Criminal convictions against Pell for abusing two teenage choirboys in December 1996 when he was the Archbishop of Melbourne were singly and jointly quashed by a bench of seven High Court judges in 2020.

Speaking to Australia, Bolt said it was the Victorian Police who told the father his son was raped by Pell.

Sue the Victorian Police, not George Pell nor the Archdiocese of Melbourne, says the media commentator.

"This man is suing Pell, who is innocent, for not foreseeing the shock this father would feel when police told him about a rape of his son.

"That ‘spoiler alert' never actually happened said Bolt.

"So sue the police instead.

"They're the ones who wrongly charged Pell after a farce of an investigation.

"They're the ones who so shocked this man by telling him his son had been raped when the evidence shows he was not."

Bolt says the ABC, in particular, should be so, so careful with this story, so sceptical, so determined to be fair to George Pell.

The ABC has been "absolutely disgusting," said Bolt.

"It (the ABC) should be embarrassed. It should be mortified. It should be looking to make amends."

Bolt accuses the ABC of getting its reporting mixed up and of an "evil and baseless witch hunt (that) put Pell in jail for 404 days for crimes he could not possibly have committed".

"They falsely painted him as a paedophile, and in a manic witch hunt led by reporters like Louise Milligan who even wrote a book and recorded a podcast and filed TV stories, all defaming Pell, all pushing these fake claims."

Accusing the ABC of a "get Pell feeding frenzy", Bolt says even when Pell was found not guilty, the ABC never apologised and it has never explained why so many ABC reporters instead treated Pell as guilty from the start.

Even in its most recent (civil claim) report, Bolt says that for some reason the ABC omitted that the son of the man suing Pell and the Archdiocese of Melbourne never made the allegation that Pell raped or sexually assaulted his son. It also omitted to report that the son told his mother, more than once that there was no sexual assault.

Source

• Sky News