Whatever posterity makes of the crisis of sexual abuse that has roiled the Roman Catholic Church for the past few decades, it will have to reckon with the startling saga of Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most prominent Catholic churchman, who died last week in Rome, age 81.

The onetime archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, confidant and adviser to Pope Benedict XVI, and trusted Vatican administrator under Pope Francis, Pell was the Vatican’s dynamic financial “czar” when, in 2017, he voluntarily returned to Australia to face criminal charges that, as archbishop two decades earlier, he had sexually abused two choirboys (one of whom had since died of a drug overdose) in the sacristy of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne.