Mourners call Australian Cardinal Pell victim of injustice

SYDNEY — Mourners at the Sydney funeral for Australian Cardinal George Pell, who was once the most senior Catholic convicted of sex abuse, remembered him Thursday as a victim of a campaign to punish him regardless of his guilt. Meanwhile, a few hundred protesters yelled slogans from the street denouncing Pell, a staunch conservative who had riled gay rights supporters and was among church leaders blamed for inaction on clergy sex abuse. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a friend of Pell and a former seminarian, described the cardinal’s prosecution as a “modern day crucifixion.” “He was made a scapegoat for the church itself,” Abbott told the mourners. Pope Francis, who in 2014 appointed Pell to be the first prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy tasked with reforming the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances, sent a message to the funeral that said Australia’s most senior Catholic had “laid the foundations with determination and wisdom” of the Vatican’s economic reforms. In the memo, Pell had lamented that the current papacy as a “disaster” and a “catastrophe.” Separately, the day after Pell died, a conservative magazine published what it said was an article by the cardinal decrying as a “toxic nightmare” Francis’ determination to sound out Catholic laity on such issues as church teaching on sexuality and the role of women.