Observers also questioned whether some courtroom tactics used by state prosecutors were intended to stoke anti-clerical feelings in jury members.
One priest, a Jesuit, was called as an expert witness by the defense, but was consistently referred to as a "Christian Brother" by prosecutors - a move, the court observer told CNA, that seemed calculated to invoke the religious order at the center of a widely known clerical sexual abuse scandal in the country.
"It was a blatant move, but it sums up the sort of anti-Catholic, anti-clerical drift of the whole trial," CNA's courtroom source said. "The jury were being winked at."
Full discussion of the charges and the evidence laid against Pell remains impossible because of the media blackout. The gag order was imposed at the request of prosecutors in June, who argued that media attention could bias the case.
"It's absurd," another source directly familiar with the trial told CNA. "Any Catholic in Victoria can tell you that our media has been steeped in anti-Catholic, anti-clerical and especially anti-Pell coverage for more than two decades. The prosecutors were perfectly happy with all of that leading up to the trial, and for it to carry on now."
"The only thing you can't talk about are the facts of the case," the source said.
In a May 2015 column for The Australian, journalist Gerard Henderson said that Pell was the victim of a "modern-day witch hunt." Henderson drew specific attention to what he called biased and inaccurate coverage of Pell by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"The lack of balance in the media's reporting of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church reflects the fact many journalists detest Pell's conservatism," Henderson wrote.
Henderson also noted that as Archbishop of Melbourne, Pell brought in a new program to deal with accusations of sexual abuse and to compensate victims within months of his arrival.
"On all the available evidence, Pell was among the first Catholic bishops in the world to address the issue of child sexual abuse by clergy," Henderson concluded.
The cardinal's legal team is said to be scrupulously complying with the gag order as lawyers work towards filing an appeal against the guilty verdict.
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While open discussion of the case remains impossible in Australia, concerns about a biased jury pool in the second trial have begun to surface indirectly.
On December 13, Victoria state Attorney-General Jill Hennessy told the Australian newspaper The Age that she had asked her department to examine the option of judge-only trials in high profile cases, where an impartial jury might be difficult to find. The state of Victoria is one of the few jurisdictions in Australia not to permit the option of a bench trial in cases like Pell's.
Earlier this year, former Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson was tried and convicted before a magistrate's court in the state of New South Wales, on the charge of failing to report clerical sexual abuse. His conviction was overturned on appeal. Appellate judge Roy Ellis noted that media portrayals of the Church's sexual abuse crisis might have been a factor in the guilty verdict.
Such portrayals "may amount to perceived pressure for a court to reach a conclusion which seems to be consistent with the direction of public opinion, rather than being consistent with the rule of law that requires a court to hand down individual justice in its decision-making processes," he said.
Victoria has faced sustained criticism for the use of suppression orders by the state's courts. Despite an Open Courts Act passed in 2013 aimed at improving judicial transparency, Victorian courts issued more than 1500 suppression orders between 2014-2016.
One source close to Pell told CNA that the cardinal's treatment during his trial had been "Kafka-esque."