Cardinal Pell was the most influential and controversial Australian churchman of his time and the most senior figure to be enmeshed by the sexual abuse revelations that have rocked the Roman Catholic church.

Pell, who denied all charges, was convicted by a Victorian County Court jury in 2018 on one count of sexually penetrating a child under 16 and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child under 16 in the 1990s while he was Archbishop of Melbourne. He was jailed for six years.

His appeal was dismissed by a two-to-one majority in the Court of Appeal and he applied for special leave to appeal to the nation's highest court. On April 9, 2020, after more than 400 days behind bars, the High Court granted Pell's application and quashed all charges on the basis of insufficient evidence.

Pell walked out of Melbourne's Barwon Prison that same day, later releasing a statement that he held no ill will toward his accuser, one of the former choirboys who came forward after the other boy died in 2014.

The trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church or its response to paedophilia in Australia, but about whether he committed the abuse of two 13-year-old choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996.

"And I did not," Pell said.

Pell, who died aged 81 in Vatican City on Wednesday morning Australian time, was always a divisive figure.

He was a scholar, sportsman and muscular warrior in defence of his version of Catholic purity.

To his supporters, and they included three popes, he was at the heart of the struggle for the soul of the church and its ancient verities in a secular world.

To his enemies, he was a dogmatic and abrasive bully who didn't suffer fools gladly and surrounded himself with yes-men. He represented the dead hand of clerical orthodoxy.

Pell was born in Ballarat on June 8, 1941, the eldest child of what was then called a mixed marriage. His father George, a boxing champion and publican, was a non-practising Anglican while his mother, Margaret, was a devout Catholic. His sister Margaret was a violinist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

After a sickly early childhood, the young Pell flourished.

He was big, yet quick and agile. He was a fine sportsman and might have played VFL football - he signed with Richmond while still at school - if the priesthood had not claimed him. He was clever and a good speaker and helping out in the family pub made him an easy mixer.

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In 1960, Pell started studying for the priesthood at Corpus Christi College, Werribee, where he was soon given leadership roles and gained a forceful reputation.

He continued playing football. His biographer, Tess Livingstone, quotes priests recalling that he was very strong, his arms "tended to fly out" and "you tended to get a headache after playing against him".

In his fourth year at Werribee, Pell was chosen to continue his studies at the Vatican's Pontifical Urban University for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in 1627. Its mission, in prominent letters at its entrance: Euntes docete omnes gentes (Go teach all nations).

Livingstone says this "extraordinary spiritual oasis" was Pell's home from 1963 to 1967, some of his most formative years. And some of the church's as well, for his time largely coincided with the Second Vatican Council.

Pell was ordained a priest in St Peter's Basilica in 1966 and he received his Licentiate of Sacred Theology the following year. His dissertation was on French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin who tried to marry science and religion in a framework of continuous evolution towards a more spiritual state. Pell was ranked fifth out of 40 classmates.

He then went to Oxford, where in 1971 he completed a doctorate in church history - his subject being the exercise of discipline in the early church.

During this period he was also chaplain to Catholic students at the establishment Eton College. He celebrated the first mass at Eton since the Reformation.

Loaded with academic achievement and multi-lingual, he returned to Australia in 1971 and was sent to Swan Hill, on the Murray River, as assistant priest.

In 1973 he came home, as curate at Ballarat East. He was also given educational responsibilities which included being a director of Ballarat's Aquinas campus of the Institute of Catholic Education, now part of the Australian Catholic University.

Pell has said saving Aquinas, which came under threat for financial and political reasons, was one of the best things he has done. He also, in this period, gained a masters degree in education from Monash.

Pell was at his most dogmatic as rector of his old alma mater Corpus Christi from 1985 to 1987.

There, in the face of bitter opposition, he imposed major change, mainly to increase the place's discipline and spirituality.

His inexorable rise continued when he became an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne in 1987.

In this period he led Caritas, the Catholic overseas aid agency and oversaw the creation of the Australian Catholic University while also doing important Vatican work. This included membership of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the old inquisition, whose boss was Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI - later Pope Emeritus - who died on December 31, 2022.

In 1996, he succeeded Sir Frank Little as Archbishop of Melbourne.

This represented a change from a somewhat freewheeling approach to doctrine and many saw Pope John Paul II's hand in it, though Pell had other powerful backers, including B.A. Santamaria.

Opponents said he shut down debate and reimposed a clerical culture.

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It was here that the storm of sexual abuse allegations broke. Pell set up the Melbourne Response, which involved investigation, counselling and compensation. He claimed it was the first such comprehensive program in the world. But journalist Louise Milligan, in her 2017 book Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell, says he rushed his initiative, pre-empting a united, national response.

Pell was always up for a fight in defence of the church's interests. He fought the National Gallery of Victoria over Piss Christ, the photograph of a crucifix in urine. He fought Victorian premier Jeff Kennett over a range of social policies. He was an early critic of One Nation

After five years he moved north as Archbishop of Sydney, replacing Cardinal Edward Clancy and becoming the first person to have headed Australia's two biggest dioceses.

The following year a Melbourne man claimed he was, when 12, sexually abused by Pell at an altar boys' camp in 1962. Pell denied the charge and stepped aside while a retired judge Alec Southwell investigated.

Southwell found the complaint unproved.

This allegation proved no setback and in 2003, to no one's surprise, Pell became a cardinal.

However, the issue of priestly sexual abuse and their cover-ups never went away. He trod a difficult path, denouncing abuses and welcoming the Gillard Labor government's Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, which began hearings in 2013, while defending the sanctity of the confessional and complaining of campaigns that targeted his church specifically.

In 2013, he appeared before a Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse. He acknowledged his church had covered up the "foul crime" and sometimes placed priests above the law.

The following year, Pope Francis appointed him cardinal prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, a new post with unprecedented powers to clean up the Vatican's murky finances. He was described as the third most powerful man in the Vatican.

One of his last acts before leaving Sydney for the Vatican was to appear before the child sexual abuse royal commission. It was a painful experience, in which he apologised to the victim of a pedophile priest, but was roundly criticised for making it by reading a statement without looking the victim in the eye.

The issue persisted, with evidence to the commission suggesting Pell was complicit in covering up gross offences in Ballarat and Melbourne. He was to have appeared before it again in late 2015, but had to pull out on medical advice, with a heart condition making the long flight from Rome risky.

In early 2016 he appeared before the commission by video-link from Rome. Fifteen victims flew to Rome to personally hear the cardinal say the church had let them down.

Worse followed. Victoria Police started investigating allegations of child abuse against Pell and three officers flew to Rome to question him on claims he had inappropriately touched two boys while swimming in the 1970s.

Then, nine months later, he was charged with historical offences.

The first trial of the 1990s offences ended in a hung jury. A retrial in December 2018 found him guilty.

However, that decision was kept secret until the following March, after the crown dropped charges relating to the swimming pool allegations.

Pell, before and after becoming a prince of the church, was a vigorous spokesman on all manner of issues. Broadly speaking, he was progressive on some social issues and a conservative on matters of faith, morals and forms of worship.

He was a republican, he didn't like the "callousness" of unrestrained capitalism, thought the Iraq war not morally justified and criticised mandatory detention for asylum seekers.

But he infuriated the Greens by saying hysterical and extreme claims about global warming were a symptom of pagan emptiness.

He supported Pope Benedict's controversial claim that condoms were aggravating the spread of AIDS.

"The idea that you can solve a great spiritual and health crisis like AIDS with a few mechanical contraptions like condoms is ridiculous," Pell said.

"Condoms are encouraging promiscuity."

He campaigned against allowing embryonic stem cell research, supported clerical celibacy and saw the ordination of women as impossible under the church's divine constitution.

Perhaps the clearest key to Pell's views came in response to a complaint made by a group of prominent Catholics in 2006 who accused him of denying their right to make moral judgements based on individual conscience.

He replied that the point at issue was whether individual conscience had primacy over the central doctrines and teachings of Jesus Christ and the church.

"There's plenty of scope (for individual conscience), but if you make those decisions and they run contrary to central church teachings, you can't claim to be a good Catholic," he said.

A close observer said Pell was more a motivator than a manager.

"He's a boots and all defender and promoter of Catholicism," she said.

"He feels the church is in battle with the secular world and he's taking it head on."

Pell's successor as Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, said much the same, if more colourfully: "A prelate who sees the world as a big football game with the Last Judgment a kind of grand final when the Sheep beat the Goats."

Australian Associated Press