Rome, Jan 11 (AP) Cardinal George Pell, a onetime financial adviser to Pope Francis who spent 404 days in solitary confinement in his native Australia before his child sex abuse convictions were overturned, has died at age 81.

He was a divisive figure. He lived to see Vatican rivals charged with financial crimes after he worked to reform the Holy See's finances. In Australia, he was a lightning rod for disagreements over whether the Catholic Church had been properly held to account for historic child sex abuse.

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Pell died Tuesday in Rome, where he had attended the funeral last week of Pope Benedict XVI. Pell suffered fatal heart complications following hip surgery, said Archbishop Peter Comensoli, Pell's successor as archbishop of Melbourne.

Sydney Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher told reporters the death had come as a shock.

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"For many people, particularly of the Catholic faith, this will be a difficult day and I express my condolences to all those who are mourning today," said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Fisher said a requiem for Pell would be held at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican in the next few days, and in time his body would be brought back to Australia for a funeral Mass and buried in the crypt at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney.

Journalist Lucie Morris-Marr, who wrote the book "Fallen" about Pell's trial, said on Twitter that Pell's death "will be terribly triggering for many Australians impacted by Catholic child sexual abuse and not just those involved in his trial."

Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, became the third-highest ranked official in the Vatican after Pope Francis tapped him in 2014 to reform the Vatican's notoriously opaque finances as the Holy See's first-ever finance czar.

He spent three years as prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy, where he tried to impose international budgeting, accounting and transparency standards.

But Pell returned to Australia in 2017 in an attempt to clear his name of child sex charges dating from his time as archbishop.

A Victoria state County Court jury convicted him of molesting two 13-year-old choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in the latest 1990s shortly after he had become archbishop of Melbourne. An initial trial had ended in a jury deadlock. Pell served 404 days in solitary confinement before the full-bench of the High Court unanimously overturned his convictions in 2020 on appeal.

The High Court found there was reasonable doubt surrounding the testimony of the main witness, now the father of a young family aged in his 30s, who said Pell had abused him and another choirboy.

During his time in prison, Pell kept a diary documenting everything from his prayers and Scripture readings to his conversations with visiting chaplains and the prison guards. The journal turned into a triptych, "Prison Journal," the proceeds of which went to pay his substantial legal bills.

In the diary, Pell reflected on the nature of suffering, Pope Francis' papacy and the humiliations of solitary confinement as he battled to clear his name for a crime he insisted he never committed.

Pell and his supporters believed he was scapegoated for all the crimes of the Australian Catholic Church's botched response to clergy sexual abuse. Victims and critics say he epitomised everything wrong with how the church has dealt with the problem, pointing in particular to a widely circulated photo of a young Pell accompanying a notorious abuser, Gerald Risdale, to court.

Pell strongly denied his own abuse allegations and repeatedly defended his response to the abuse scandal while a bishop and later the archbishop of Melbourne, though he acknowledged the Catholic hierarchy as a whole had made "enormous mistakes." He expressed regret over encounters with victims seeking compensation, saying he and others in the church failed in their moral and pastoral responsibilities to them.

Anthony Foster testified at one of Australia's inquiries into abuse that when he and his wife sought compensation over the abuse their daughters suffered, Pell showed a "sociopathic lack of empathy."

Even after he was acquitted of the Melbourne allegations, Pell's reputation remained tarnished by the scandal and in particular his handling of other priests who abused children and his treatment of victims. Australian inquiries concluded that Pell created a victims' compensation program mainly to limit the church's liability, and that he aggressively tried to discourage victims from pursuing lawsuits.

Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the highest form of inquiry in the country, also found that he knew of clergy molesting children in the 1970s and did not take adequate action to address it.

Pell had testified remotely to the Royal Commission over four days in Rome in 2016, a remarkable moment in the history of the church's reckoning with abuse that saw a top Vatican cardinal sitting in a hotel conference room answering questions via video link from 10 pm-2 am each night, with victims, journalists and supporters in the audience. (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)