The former Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne and Archbishop of Sydney died from heart complications on Tuesday evening following hip surgery.

Pell was the Vatican’s top finance minister before he left Rome in 2017 to stand trial in Melbourne for child sexual abuse offences.

Pell was born in Ballarat in 1941 and was ordained a priest at St Peter’s Basilica in 1966, returning to his home town in 1973 to work as a director of the city’s Aquinas campus.

He succeeded Sir Frank Little as Melbourne Archbishop in 1996 and then moved to Sydney to be the archbishop there five years later.

At that time, a man claimed Cardinal Pell sexually abused him in 1962 when he was an altar boy. Cardinal Pell denied the charge and in 2003 he became a cardinal in the Vatican.

In 2013, Cardinal Pell 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, which placed him as the third most powerful man in the Vatican.

In 2018, Pell was convicted of molesting two 13-year-old choirboys in the sacristy at St Patrick’s Cathedral while he was Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996.

One of the choirboys died of a drug overdose in April 2014 and his father said he was told about his son’s alleged abuse the following year by police.

Pell, who denied all charges, was convicted by a Victorian County Court jury on one count of sexually penetrating a child under 16 and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child under 16, and was jailed for six years.

His appeal was dismissed by a two-to-one majority in the Court of Appeal but applied for special leave to appeal to the High Court, which overturned his conviction on the basis of insufficient evidence in April 2020.

He was released from prison after serving more than 400 days.

Cardinal Pell meets Pope Francis in Rome after his child sex abuse conviction was overturned. Photo supplied.

In August 2022, a Victorian court ruled that the deceased choirboy’s father was able to take civil action against Pell and the Catholic Church after denying the church use of a legal loophole to avoid it.

The Catholic Church tried to be excused from the proceedings by relying on the Ellis defence, arguing the man could not sue as he was not the direct victim of the alleged sexual abuse.

Up until 2018, the church could use the defence to deny liability to sexual abuse victims.

The case is believed to be the first to test the whether the Legal Identity of Defendants Act, brought in to abolish the Ellis defence, applies to secondary victims including family members.

Lawyers representing the father, known under pseudonym RWQ, said the act’s wording allowed for claims to be brought against the clergy “founded on or arising from child abuse”.

The judge ruled the law could extend to the father as a secondary victim of child abuse.

Shine Lawyers who are representing the father said today that the legal claim against the church and the cardinal’s estate would continue.

In August 2022, the release of unredacted reports of a 2017 Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse showed the inquiry rejected Cardinal Pell’s evidence that he was deceived and lied to by Catholic Church officials about Australia’s worst pedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale, and Melbourne parish priest Peter Searson.

The findings related to Pell’s knowledge of abuse allegations in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was a priest and bishop’s adviser in Ballarat and an auxiliary bishop and adviser to the archbishop in Melbourne.

In December 2020, Pell inferred to Italian media that his charges in Victoria were related to his work on Vatican financial reform.

Archbishop of Melbourne Peter Comensoli said the cardinal was a very significant and influential church leader, both in Australia and abroad.

“Let our prayers go out to the God of Jesus Christ, whom Cardinal Pell wholeheartedly believed in and followed, that he may be welcomed into eternal life,” the archbishop said in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

It would be a very difficult day for Cardinal Pell’s family and loved ones, Victorian government minister Steve Dimopoulos said.

“But also a very difficult day for survivors and victims of child sexual abuse and their families, and my thoughts are with them,” Dimopoulos told reporters on Wednesday.

-with AAP