Father of Pell Victim Speaks Out
MACFARLANE: You're watching CNN and this is CONNECT THE WORLD. Welcome back. Let's get you up to speed now on some other stories that are on our radar right now. Brexit is a lesson for us all. Those are the words of French President Emmanuel Macron in an opinion piece addressed to EU citizens ahead of May's European elections. In it, Mr. Macron cites Brexit of the starkest example of the dangers facing the EU and outlines his vision for the block. India is denying Pakistan's claim that one of its submarines tried to enter Pakistani waters. The Indian government is dismissing this video as part of a campaign to create war hysteria. It comes amid a spike intention between the two countries. The Egyptian government has released an award-winning photojournalist who had been held in jail for five years. Mahmoud Abou Zeid was arrested for taking pictures of a crackdown of antigovernment protests in 2013. Though out of jail, Amnesty International says Abou Zeid will have to spend 12 hours a day in a local police station for the next five years. A patient in London might be the second person to be cured of HIV. The man has been in remission for 18 months after a treatment involving stem cells transplants. This case comes more than ten years after the virus was eliminated in a Berlin patient using similar stem cell therapy. Now to the sex abuse scandal that has been rocking the Catholic Church and to the scars that never heal. Cardinal George Pell, as you know, was convicted of child sex abuse. He is scheduled to be sentenced next week. CNN's Anna Coren is the only international journalist to speak with the father of one of Pell's victims. She says his son spiraled after he was molested.</s>ANNA COREN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Dressed in his chorister robes, his thick hair brushed to one side, this young boy is a picture of innocence and so much promise. It's the way his father tries to remember him.</s>FATHER OF PELL VICTIM: If he wasn't playing lacrosse, he was at the football. If he can't at football, he would be at church, at the choir.</s>COREN: To be in the choir was a privileged position. He had been handpicked along with two other boys from his local school to be a choir boy at St. Patrick's Cathedral. It came with a scholarship to a prestigious Melbourne private school and a world his parents would never have been able to afford.</s>FATHER OF PELL VICTIM: For my son, it was a fabulous opportunity. Yes, and it would have been fabulous for his future.</s>COREN: But it was inside this blue stone basilica that sits on Eastern Hill in the city where unspeakable crimes happened to his son and his friend when they were just 13 years old. Neither the boys nor their families can be identified for legal reasons. A jury found that Cardinal George Pell, then Archbishop of Melbourne, caught them in the pre-sacristy after Sunday mass in 1996. He forced the other choir boy to perform oral sex on him before indecently assaulting both boys. While his son never spoke of the attack, he says his behavior the following year suggested something had gone terribly wrong.</s>FATHER OF PELL VICTIM: He was trying to mask something that had happened to him. He was trying to cover up something that had happened to him so heinous, so horrible.</s>COREN: His father says he was kicked out of the choir, lost his scholarship and fell into the wrong crowd. Within 12 months, his treasured son was injecting heroine. An addiction that would eventually claim his life after an accidental overdose in 2014. His parents had to identify him at the morgue.</s>FATHER OF PELL VICTIM: You -- you look at him and you think, why? What a waste. What a waste of life.</s>COREN: He believes it was his son's death that would prompt the surviving choir boy to go to police. When Cardinal Pell was interviewed by Australian detectives in Rome in 2016, he scoffed at the allegations.</s>GEORGE PELL, FORMER CARDINAL, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: What a load of absolutely disgraceful rubbish. Completely false. Madness.</s>COREN: A jury found Pell guilty on all five charges of child sexual abuse.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're the devil.</s>COREN: The 77-year-old maintains his innocence and has lodged an appeal. (on camera): Despite the fact Cardinal George Pell is now a convicted pedophile, he still has enormous support here in Australia. Former Prime Ministers, media commentators, even some church leaders have all questioned the voracity of the jury's decision. Sowing the seeds of doubt as to whether the crimes that took place inside this Cathedral 22 years ago ever happened at all.</s>LISA FLYNN, SHINE LAWYER: This isn't a case where there's been only allegations. There has been a unanimous jury verdict of guilt in this case. And to suggest that somehow the jury didn't get it right, that the victims and the survivors should still not be believed, I think, is incredibly dangerous.</s>COREN (voice-over): The father is now considering a civil case against the church, which if successful, could prove to be a test case for other survivors and their families who have been betrayed by an institution that was supposed to keep children safe. Anna Coren, CNN, Melbourne.