Cardinal George Pell has been acquitted of child sex abuse and released from jail.

After an extraordinary legal fight to clear his name the 78-year-old prelate, formerly the Vatican’s chief financial officer and an adviser to Pope Francis, was released from the maximum security Barwon prison in Victoria early this morning after serving a year of a six-year jail term.

“I have consistently maintained my innocence while suffering from a serious injustice,” Cardinal Pell said in a statement issued soon after the High Court of Australia quashed his conviction. “I hold no ill will to my accuser, I do not want my acquittal to add to the hurt and bitterness so many feel; there is certainly hurt and bitterness enough.

“However, my trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church; nor a referendum on how Church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of paedophilia in the Church.

“The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes, and I did not.”

Cardinal Pell became the highest-ranking church official to be jailed for sexually abusing children when, in 2018, a County Court jury convicted him of attacks on two choirboys more than two decades earlier.

High Court judges ruled 7-0 that the jury should have entertained a doubt about Cardinal Pell’s guilt. The ruling quashes Cardinal Pell’s conviction based on allegations that the prelate had abused the choirboys at St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996 and 1997, soon after he became Archbishop of Melbourne. One of the boys gave evidence against Cardinal Pell, while the second died in 2014, without disclosing any abuse.

A jury found Cardinal Pell guilty of five counts of sexual abuse, although he had always maintained his innocence. Due to Covid-19 restrictions on public gatherings, there were none of the boisterous rallies from supporters of Cardinal Pell and victims’ advocates that had been seen at previous court hearings.

People who cannot get to confession because of the coronavirus lockdown or another serious reason can go to God directly, be specific about their sins, request pardon and experience God’s loving forgiveness, Pope Francis said.

“This is the right time, the opportune moment. An act of contrition done well, and our souls will become white like the snow,” the pope said March 20 during his livestreamed morning Mass.

Pope Francis began the Mass by praying again for doctors, especially in northern Italy, where the COVID-19 pandemic still is infecting thousands and leading to the deaths of hundreds of people each day.

The Italian health ministry announced late March 19 that the number of deaths in Italy had reached 3,407, surpassing by 277 the number of people who had died in China because of the virus.

Italy began a nationwide lockdown March 10 in an attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Churches are open for private prayer and priests can hear confessions if they are wearing a mask and gloves and stay more than 3 feet away from the penitent. But people are being encouraged not to leave their homes at all.

The first reading at Mass March 20 was from Hosea, and it encourages people to return to the Lord with all their hearts, recognizing their sins and letting God forgive them, the pope said in his homily.

“Return to your father who is waiting for you,” the pope said. “The God of tenderness will heal us; he will heal us of the many, many wounds of life and the many ugly things we have done. Each of us has our own!”

God welcomes every repentant sinner with open arms, he said. “It’s like going home.”

Lent is a special time “to let God wash us, purify us, to let God embrace us,” the pope said, and the best place for that is the confessional.

“But many people today would tell me, ‘Father, where can I find a priest, a confessor, because I can’t leave the house? And I want to make peace with the Lord, I want him to embrace me, I want the Father’s embrace.’”

Although Islamic State has been defeated in northern Iraq, the “Islamist mindset” that persists in the region has made Christian refugees from the region “afraid to return,” according to one of Iraq’s most senior Catholic Bishops.

Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Najeeb Michaeel Moussa of Mosul and Akra told Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need that although Christians in Iraq remain active and hopeful about the future, the ancient Christian presence in the region, already much diminished by years of war and persecution, is threatened by a resurgence of Islamic extremism.

Archbishop Moussa explain-ed that among Christians, the greatest fear, and one which prevents Christians from returning to their former homes in Mosul, “is that of seeing the renewed growth of Islamic fundamentalism.”

Before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, around 1.4 mill-ion Christians lived in the country. At present, fewer than 250,000 remain: a drop of 80% in less than two decades. Under the Islamic state, Christians were often offered a choice between conversion to Islam and death; at best, they were expected to pay a special levy to ISIS in return for their lives. In Mosul, Arch-bishop Moussa’s diocese, of the roughly 15,000 Christian residents of the region prior to ISIS’s rule over the region, none remained by the time of the area’s liberation in 2017. Although Mosul is one of the largest cities in Iraq, few Christians have so far returned there.

In a recent blog post Fr Nicanor Austriaco, O.P., S.T.D, Ph.D., said he sees reason to hope that the drug hydroxy-chloroquine could be used to treat the corona virus, or COVID-19. Austriaco is a professor of biology and theology at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He is currently on lockdown in the Philippines with his mother during the coronavirus pandemic.

“As a molecular biologist, what is so exciting for me about this claim is that the clinical trial in France was pretty good, given the extreme circumstances,” Austriaco wrote.

“Yes, it was a small trial, but if you read the paper, it was rigorous for what it wanted to do, which is to be a pilot study. And it showed that HCQ significantly shortened the time for the patient to clear (the) virus from his or her system.”

Another independent study from a lab in China has shown that HCQ “can prevent viral reproduction in a test tube,” Austriaco added, which is said is hopeful from a microbiology perspective.

In an email to CNA, Fr Austriaco noted that both HCQ and a related drug, CQ, have been used in humans to treat malaria “all over the world, including here in the Philippines.”

“They have also been used to treat autoimmune diseases like lupus. So we know that they are safe for most people,” he said. However, he added, the prescription drugs “should only be taken under the supervision of a physician… because for some people, they can trigger harmful heart conditions.”

While the FDA has approved HCQ for human use for certain diseases, Austriaco noted that it has not yet approved HCQ for use in the treatment of COVID-19, except for in very limited circumstances.

Fabio Stevenazzi, a diocesan priest in Italy, was a doctor before entering the seminary. Now he is donning his white coat once more to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Italy is facing a national crisis caused by a lack of hospital beds and health personnel. Now that the churches in Italy have been emptied by the Italian government’s emergency decrees in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, Stevenazzi, 48, has decided to return to medical practice in order to help those infected with COVID-19, according to a report by the website of the diocese of Milan.