Counsel assisting the royal commission have fired both barrels into the heart of St Peter’s Basilica.Those who have heard the commission evidence will know that Pell has been exposed on several fronts, substantively as a clergyman who held multiple senior roles after arriving in Melbourne in 1987, when he was promoted to auxiliary bishop.
Pell’s chief defence is that he played no major role in the affairs that unfolded in the Doveton parish and he was not a senior church decision-maker at the time.
More broadly, he was even more junior when working in the crime-stricken diocese of Ballarat.
The big-picture problem for Pell, the Pope and the church in Australia is how much damage it is prepared to continue to wear in defending the nation’s most powerful Catholic.
The theory is that Francis, having been accused of remaining silent during Argentina’s Dirty War, knows well the reputational damage that can flow from being a senior Catholic and will not judge Pell harshly.
To that end, the recommendations made by counsel assisting yesterday do not put Pell at the upper ends of administrative negligence.
The administrators most at fault were the late archbishop Frank Little and the late bishop Ronald Mulkearns.
Yet hardheads in the church will be wondering how much more damage the church can sustain while defending Pell.
In perception terms, each day that he stands, punch drunk, fighting his position is a day longer that the church in Melbourne and Ballarat must wait to rebuild its battered reputation.
There is legal fairness and process to be considered in this debate.
But from the Vatican down, there must be questions about how much longer the church can bear to live with the dead weight of the cardinal’s past holding it back.