(dpa/NAN)
A Catholic publisher issued an appeal on Sunday for donations to help print disgraced former Catholic leader, Cardinal George Pell’s thousand-page prison diary.
Ignatius Press wants to give Pell “appropriate advances” for the diary to help offset his legal debts, Editor Father Joseph Fessio, said in a public post on the publisher’s website.
The publisher plans to release the first of three or four volumes of the diary in 2021.
‘I’ve already read the first half of the journal and it is extraordinary.
‘I think it’s going to be a spiritual classic,’ Fessio wrote.
Pell wrote the diary during his 13 months in a Melbourne prison before he was acquitted of sexually abusing two choirboys by Australia’s High Court in April.
Fessio said Pell muses in his diary on everything from his conversations with lawyers about his case to U.S. politics, sport and his reform efforts at the Vatican.
Fessio said Pell’s acquittal was a victory for the Church.
‘It revealed to all the world just how far the Church’s enemies will go and how deceitful they will be to discredit her.’
Since his release from prison, Pell has lived at a Sydney monastery.