His dismissal of what he insisted was implausible was made during an interview with Victoria police in Rome in October 2016 - a near unimaginable event itself, even now.

Pell was a Cardinal, hand-picked by the Pope as the treasurer of all the vast economic activities of the Vatican making him one of the most powerful Catholics in the world.

Yet here were police from Melbourne, requiring answers about allegations that, after a Sunday mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne in December 1996, Pell had exposed himself and sexually assaulted two 13-year-old choir boys in a sacristy where priests dress for mass.

"Oh stop it," Pell responded to the police. "What a load of absolute and disgraceful rubbish. Completely false. Madness."

The 42-minute video recording of the interview was played to a jury during Pell’s first trial in Melbourne’s County Court in September last year.

The video shows Pell sitting in the conference room of the Hotel Quirinale, arms folded, with lawyer Michael do Rozario seated next to him as Detective Sergeant Christopher Reed, out of view, asked questions.

When the next allegation was put to him – that he had taken the second boy and put his penis in the boy’s mouth – Pell said: ‘‘In a sacristy after Mass? Completely false.’’

When Detective Reed outlined the allegation that the then-archbishop had the second boy undress before he sexually abused him, Pell responded: ‘‘This is in the sacristy in the cathedral after Sunday Mass?’’

‘‘Well, need I say any more? What a load of garbage and falsehood and deranged falsehood.’’

It seems unlikely Pell could have envisaged the chain of events that followed this extraordinary interview - criminal charges, trial by jury, conviction, and the prospect of imprisonment despite Pell’s continued assertion that he is “completely innocent”.

There was, indeed, a sense of unreality when Pell returned to Melbourne from Rome last year to face a hearing to determine whether he would even be required to stand trial.

From the first day in March last year the door of court 22 at Melbourne Magistrates Court was opened to the public and the man hired to represent Pell was ruthless in defence of his client.

Barrister Robert Richter, QC, renowned for his confrontational courtroom tactics, tore into police, advocates for victims of sex abuse and even the magistrate.

Mr Richter, Australia’s foremost criminal defence counsel, is famed for successfully defending Mick Gatto on the charge of murdering underworld hitman Andrew Veniamin.

During the four-week hearing, 30 witnesses were called.

The cardinal, who was never called to give evidence, sat next to Mr Richter, scrawling into a notepad, head bowed, only occasionally lifting his gaze when witness testimony seemed to pique his interest.

But he stared very intently at ABC journalist Louise Milligan as she was treated to an intense cross-examination from Mr Richter about whether she wrote her book, The Rise and Fall of George Pell, in a way that suggested alleged victims were to be believed over the cardinal.

Born 77 years ago in Ballarat, an old gold city that in the 21st century has hunkered beneath the bleak cloud of the knowledge that paedophile priests once terrorised children in schools and institutions there, Pell was considered the young man who could become anything.

He showed early that he did not give in to adversity: as a child, he endured 24 operations to remove a tumour from his throat.

He grew to become a big, physically tough ruckman in St Patrick’s College’s all but invincible First XVIII for the last years of the 1950s, and signed with the Richmond Football Club. His father, a gold miner, hoped young George, academically gifted, would choose medicine or the law. Fate intervened: he was drawn to the priesthood.

His biographer, Tess Livingstone, recorded that Pell had explained his calling thus: "To put it crudely, I feared and suspected and eventually became convinced that God wanted me to do His work, and I was never able to successfully escape that conviction."

Ordained in 1966 after studying in Rome, he rose to become auxiliary bishop of Melbourne by 1987. Within a decade, he was appointed Archbishop of Melbourne.

Time passed, and one of his Pell’s first responsibilities after becoming Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996 was to establish the so-called Melbourne Response to cases of sexual abuse by priests against children.

It would be this fraught process that catapulted him to public controversy that has never eased. It caused many Catholics and others to take sides, both in favour of this conservative champion of the institutional church, and against a man seen to have failed abused children.

His appearances before the commission, on shaky video link from Rome in March, 2016, did him few favours.

He appeared to shove responsibility to others for things that had gone wrong, or said he’d been deceived, or that victims hadn’t asked him for specific actions, so he’d done nothing.

But it wasn’t just those watching the video link in Australia who witnessed Pell’s testimony.

As he prepared to give his evidence, thousands of people lined the streets of Ballarat as a group of 16 survivors left to travel to Rome to hear Pell first hand.

Four nights later, Paul Levey led those survivors as they marched to hear Pell's evidence at the Hotel Quirinale.

Mr Levey, aged 14, was raped daily while living with priest Gerald Ridsdale at a presbytery in Mortlake after his parents separated in 1982.

He had waited years to face Pell, who he accused of being part of a widespread operation that shifted Ridsdale from parish to parish allowing him to continue to abuse children.

Occasionally Mr Levey, who suffers deep vein thrombosis, had to stand up during the hearing, but couldn't bring himself to leave until the cardinal had finished his evidence.

Pell told the commission that Ridsdale's crimes were a "sad story" but were "not of much interest" to him at the time.

"The suffering, of course, was real, and I very much regret that, but I had no reason to turn my mind to the extent of the evils that Ridsdale had perpetrated," he said.

Pell was grilled for four nights, and each night, high-profile victim's advocate Anthony Foster fronted the world's media in Rome holding a photo of his two smiling daughters, Emma and Katherine, dressed in their school uniforms.

"These are my girls," he declared.

"A Catholic priest was raping them when this photo was taken. This was my perfect family. We created that. The Catholic Church destroyed it."

He confronted Pell outside the hotel, clutching the cardinal’s hand, telling him "he was holding the hand of a broken man".

Pell stared at Mr Foster for a moment in silence, before he was ushered away by his minders.

Mr Foster died in 2017 after suffering a stroke, and was given a state funeral.

The day after the hearing ended, Pell stood on the steps of the hotel and pledged to help those "wounded by the scourge of sexual abuse".

"One suicide is too many, and there have been many such tragic suicides," he said, reading from a scrunched-up handwritten note. "I commit myself to working … to try to stop this so that suicide is not seen as an option for those who are suffering."

As survivors wiped away tears, Pell said he grieved for Ballarat and prayed daily for victims whose lives had been shattered.

The Age’s religious correspondent at the time, Barney Zwartz, wrote that “Watching Pell give evidence, I wondered whether he was handicapped by his unfortunate demeanour: his slow, heavy delivery and unemotional expression can seem pompous, overbearing and unfeeling.”

Pell himself, in an interview in Rome the following day, tried to explain his poor showing.

"I find it difficult to express my emotions, that is the way I am,” he said. “Sometimes when the cover of a book is dull or boring, it doesn't mean the contents inside are like that."

Soon after, Pell was charged.

His promises came to nothing.

The Age