The cardinal was first convicted by a Victorian County Court jury in March 2019, a verdict upheld months later in a split decision by the Victorian Court of Appeal.

As did the dissenting appeal court judge, the High Court has found "a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof".

Cardinal Pell's pre-eminence in the Catholic Church meant the decision to investigate, and then to charge, such a senior figure, carried enormous ramifications.

The cardinal referred to this yesterday, when he said: "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."

Legally, that may be where the matter lies for the time being, but other consequences will flow from Cardinal Pell's regained freedom.

To start with, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is now presumed free to release redacted material concerning the cardinal that had remained confidential so as to not prejudice the legal process.

There is another court - the court of public opinion - that will pass judgement on the entirety of Cardinal Pell's career, including a 2002 internal church investigation that cleared him of fondling a boy in a swimming pool in the 1960s: similar allegations were to have been tested in the so-called "swimmers' trial" that was discontinued at pre-trial hearings in February last year.

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Cardinal Pell is right to say his case was not a referendum on Catholic clerical abuse, because nothing can balance his church's shocking litany of rape, molestation, intimidation and cover-up, here in the Hunter, nationally, and abroad.

The cardinal has been judged - and had that judgement reversed.

But such a man of the cloth must answer ultimately to his God: a god that increasingly few Australians have much faith in any more, thanks in great part to the individual and institutional failings of an organisation that - despite its good works - has a long way to go in convincing ordinary people it has regained its moral compass.

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