Pell, who will be eligible for parole in three years and eight months, will be placed on a register of sexual offenders for the rest of his life. Pell’s five convictions carried a maximum possible penalty of 10 years each. The length of the sentence upset some supporters of the victims. “It's a joke,” said one women in the court room. “He'll be out in three.”

The Australian judge who oversaw Pell’s trial and conviction, Chief Judge Peter Kidd, allowed the sentencing to be broadcast live on television. Courtroom broadcasts are rare in Australia, and the decision might have been an effort by the court to dispel a perception that Pell, 77, received special protection when it imposed an Internet-wide gag order on his trial and guilty verdict. That order was defied by The Washington Post and other news outlets.

Pell’s conviction for fondling one 13-year-old boy and forcing another 13-year-old to perform oral sex on him at St. Patrick’s, in Melbourne’s grandest cathedral, shocked Catholics in Australia and worldwide. Pell behaved with “staggering arrogance” when he caught the boys who had snuck into in a changeroom after Mass to drink sacramental wine, the judge said. “It was a brazen and forcible sexual attack upon the two victims.”

One of the victims is now the dead. The other, who cannot be legally identified, said he appreciates the court recognized that he was assaulted but was waiting to see if Pell’s appeal would succeed.“It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment,” he said in a written statement. “It is hard for me, for the time being, to take comfort from this outcome. I appreciate the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However, there is no rest for me.”

At the end of the sentencing, Kidd said: “If Cardinal Pell could be taken away please.” Pell bowed, then walked slowly out of the packed courtroom with the help on a wooden cane escorted by five police officers.

Pell, who oversaw the Vatican’s finances, is one of the most senior Australian religious figures in history. Since the conviction, a powerful network of allies and supporters has emerged to suggest that he may have been a victim of a miscarriage of justice. “Should the appeal fail, I hope and pray Pell, heading for prison, is not the unwitting victim of a nation in search of a scapegoat,” Frank Brennan, a prominent Jesuit priest and human rights lawyer, wrote in the newspaper The Australian.

Victims and victims’ advocates expressed disappointment that the integrity of the legal system was being questioned after Pell was found guilty in a unanimous verdict by a 12-member jury overseen by a senior judge. “For too long in the Catholic Church, people who were abused weren’t believed,” Francis Sullivan, a former chief executive of Catholic Health Australia, a network of hospitals and nursing homes owned by the church, said on a current affairs television show. “They were actively silenced. The weight and might of the church either negotiated them away, disregarded them, told them to go home and left them to a life of peril, a life of misery,” he said.

At the end of the trial, Robert Richter, Pell’s lead attorney, told the judge that the assault was “no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case.” The comment by Richter, one of Melbourne’s leading criminal defenders, was regarded by many victims of sexual abuse as trivializing the psychological harm they suffered at the hands of priests. While one of Pell’s victims died several years ago of a heroin overdose, the other said he had experienced shame, loneliness and depression. Richter was quickly rebuffed by Kidd, who said there was an “element of brutality” in the assault.

“He exploited two vulnerable boys, and there was an element of force,” Kidd said in court. “The way he grabbed the boys’ heads, he [continued] in the face of verbal and physical protest.” Richter later apologized outside court and said he was so angry about the verdict that he had lost his objectivity and would not lead Pell’s legal team through an appeal. “After spending a sleepless night reflecting upon the terrible choice of phrase I used in court during the course of a long and stressful process, I offer my sincerest apologies to all who were hurt or offended by it,” he said.

A. O. Patrick, Washington Post