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"Today, it is like a radio station in my head, and it keeps on flicking over to different stations and some of them are louder than other stations. I wish I could take the batteries out so there was silence.
"I am definitely triggered."
Catholic child sexual abuse survivor Julie Stewart wrote these words to me on Wednesday morning just after hearing the news about the sudden death of Catholic Cardinal George Pell.
The survivors and victims and complainants of child sexual abuse in the Australian Catholic Church will not dance on the Cardinal's grave.
For them, as Stewart says, the Cardinal's death is a very triggering thing. A sombre occasion. A day when the vulnerable child inside them is bursting out again. A hard day.
For the rest of Australian society, even long before the child sexual abuse scandal shook the church to its foundations, Pell was an enormously polarising figure, a man of muscular and uncompromising faith whom many people found deeply inspiring, and many others found deeply repellent.
Even the past tense "was" still seems strange for a figure so huge in the life of the church and the nation. How can this man, enormous in legacy and in physical stature, be a "was"?
The responses on social and mainstream media reflect this — everything from proclaiming him a saint for our times to a celebratory "ding dong" and "good riddance".
I received many messages from people assuming that I would be somehow glad or relieved that he was gone.
But I just felt numb. Because I thought of all the people I have come to know who I knew would be hurting, and the enormous burden of historical sadness that surrounds the man and his legacy.
People like Julie, victims of paedophile clergy whom the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found Pell knew or ought to have known about, but failed to act to stop them.
"So, George Pell is dead. The one person that had so much control over an institution, yet refused to take care of the innocent and instead protected the perpetrators that took away the innocent lives of so many countless children," Julie Stewart wrote to me this morning.
"We are no longer innocent children, most of us that are still alive and lucky enough, have our own children and grandchildren," she wrote.
"But those little girls and little boys are deeply burrowed inside of us … and we carry deep pain and grief for that little girl or little boy that we used to be, that child that did not get to be a normal little girl or boy like the rest of you.
"We carried shame and guilt and secrets, and all we wanted to do was to matter."
All we wanted to do was matter. Julie never fails to get me right in the solar plexus.
The toll left behind
Despite the intense loyalty that Pell still inspires in some people, former prime ministers included, there are many, many survivors, like Julie, of Catholic paedophile clergy who feel that George Pell and the Church he stood at the apex of made them feel like they didn't matter at all.
So, for them, not to mention the men who made direct complaints of historical child sex crimes against the Cardinal himself — only to see him ultimately acquitted by the High Court of Australia — the merest whisper of his name has always invoked a shudder.
Julie is a survivor of Peter Searson, a frankly, repugnant paedophile priest at the Melbourne parish of Doveton, and one of several abusive clergy whom the royal commission found Pell ought to have known about.
Searson, Fasciale, Dowlan, Ridsdale. Remember their names. There are hundreds of victims of these men of the cloth. Some of the victims took their own lives. Some of them aren't able to work. Many suffer intolerable post-traumatic stress disorder. The royal commission found that Pell, among others, failed to act to stop them. Instead, they were tolerated or moved on to other parishes.
It is hard to sum up the enormity of the toll left behind by these people.
In Ballarat, Pell's hometown and the diocese where he grew his power, the royal commission described a "catastrophic institutional failure". Knowing the people affected by the failure as I do, it's hard to adequately sum up the toll it took.
I can still picture the clip-clopping of Julie's little shoes, her long braids flying in the wind, as she raced out of the confessional, aged eight, into the arms of her principal Graeme Sleeman, after Searson had used the blessed sacrament to sexually abuse her.
Julie was eight.
Sleeman lost his career as a principal trying to get justice for Julie and to expose Searson. His pleas were ignored by the Catholic hierarchy, including the Catholic Education Office, for 12 years.
But he wasn't the only one who tried — five years after Julie was abused, a delegation of Doveton parishioners went to see George Pell, who was then Auxiliary Bishop of the Melbourne Archdiocese, with responsibility for the area around Doveton.
The Doveton delegation brought to Pell a catalogue of extremely odd behaviour by Searson — in the parishioners' words, "harassment of children".
"In our view, any of those matters ought to have prompted investigation and action," the commissioners found.
"Each of those events carries an implication of sexual misconduct. They are all improper …
"Bishop Pell was in a senior position … The staff came as a delegation to him as an Auxiliary Bishop to complain about their employer."
The allegations included cruelty to an animal in front of the children – stabbing a bird (Pell infamously said, as if it mattered, he didn't know if the bird was alive or dead), showing the children a dead body in a coffin, carrying a gun around the playground.
"There was a suggestion of sexual impropriety in that Father Searson was using the boys' toilets unnecessarily," the commissioners found.
"[One delegate] told Bishop Pell that Father Searson was mentally unwell and that something needed to be done.
"These matters, in combination with the prior allegation of sexual misconduct, ought to have indicated to Bishop Pell that Father Searson needed to be stood down."
But that didn't happen. Searson stayed at his Doveton post for another seven years and went on to abuse more children.
It was Pell, as Archbishop, who eventually moved Searson out of Doveton, but there is no adequate explanation for why it took so long.
'An autopsy while you are alive'
As for Julie Stewart, she was motivated to act against Pell after she came forward to his infamous Melbourne Response, designed to compensate the victims of clergy abuse in the archdiocese, but ultimately seen as a silencing tool.
Julie received $25,000 in compensation and a letter of apology signed by Pell for her lifetime of pain — a typically small sum of money in a scheme that capped payments at $50,000.
"I think I bought my mum and dad a washing machine and put some gas in my brother's car and then I just put it away," Julie told me.
During the mediation process, she was forced to sit in a room at a table with Searson, a process she described to me later as like having an autopsy while you are alive.
What really motivated Julie to speak out about Pell in the royal commission was when she saw the Cardinal give evidence in a Victorian parliamentary inquiry saying that no conviction had been recorded for Searson — there "might" be victims.
"Might?" thought a furious Julie, watching the evidence in her lounge room. "Might?"
The letter given to her with the ex gratia payment had said:
"Unfortunately we cannot change what has happened in the past. You may never be rid of the memories or the hurt … On behalf of the Catholic Church and personally, I apologise to you and to those around you for the wrongs and the hurt that you suffered at the hands of Father Searson."
The letter was marked with the distinctive signature of George Pell.
It was Julie's story about this letter that first led me to start investigating George Pell for the ABC's 7.30 program, and then to go on to write my book, Cardinal, The Rise and Fall of George Pell. It led me to question whether this man was a truth teller.
The findings of the royal commission are, effectively, that he was not.
Nothing stopped Pell's rise to power
This story of Pell's (mis)handling of Searson is but one of the many that surround this man and make victims feel so numb today.
Nothing stopped his rise to power. Pell became Archbishop of Melbourne, then Archbishop of Sydney, then Cardinal, then Prefect for the Secretariat for the Economy – in charge of the Vatican's finances and the third most senior Catholic in the world.
He was an intelligent, Oxford-educated man who played his church politics like he had once played his football — tough — and he achieved the greatness he had been told was his destiny since he was a child.
It wasn't until the royal commission, and then the allegations by a group of men that the Cardinal had abused them, that things began to unravel for George Pell, but the enormous self-belief (not to mention that of his sympathisers) never seemed to be truly eroded.
The police investigation and ensuing legal battle into those allegations took five years — with a jury at first convicting him of abusing two teenage choirboys, the Victorian Court of Appeal upholding the conviction, then the High Court unanimously acquitting him on the basis that the jury must, in the court's view, have entertained a reasonable doubt.
It was a huge blow for the complainants — some of whose allegations were never fully tested. Two of the alleged victims died long before Pell himself.
In my book about his life, seen through the prism of the sexual abuse scandal in the life of his church, I quoted Steerforth, the ebullient character in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield.
"Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles and win the race."
His champions will call him a saint. I always thought of him as a Steerforth.
'Today is about survival'
Julie Stewart isn't trying to win any races. She's trying to survive.
We are the same age and I've always said when I look at her first communion photo, so similar to mine, of a sweet little girl with a lot of promise, I think how lucky I was, and how unfair it was that she was chosen to be blighted in this way.
All she wanted to do was matter.
She wrote to me this morning that after years of therapy and self-help and refusal to let all of this get the better of her, she now knows she does.
"Now, I know I absolutely do matter and I make myself matter every single day. I always mattered and I mattered back then too," Julie wrote.
"Today, I carry a photo of that little girl that loved to dance, and I live today for her.
"I feel joy and happiness for her today and every day after that.
"I will take today as a reflection day on what today represents for me," she wrote about Pell.
"Not about the death of an individual that is making great headlines.
"Today is about the survival outside of all that noise and the celebration of all the little boys and girls that deserved a better outcome.
"You matter, you always did and you always will.
"My name is Julie Stewart."
Louise Milligan is a Four Corners reporter and the author of Cardinal, The Rise and Fall of George Pell.