BALLARAT, Australia:- One of the pope’s top advisers, Cardinal George Pell, makes his first court appearance in Australia this week on charges of historic sex crimes, a bitter reminder for his home town reeling from more than a dozen abuse cases. Pell, the Vatican’s economy minister, last month became the most senior Catholic to be charged with sex crimes. He has vowed to fight the still-unspecified charges, calling them false and the result of a “relentless character assassination”. He declined to respond to interview requests for this story.

He is expected to appear before Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday.–Reuters

Police have not released details of the charges, but the start of Pell’s court battle in Melbourne revisits a troubled past for Ballarat, the former gold town of 100,000 people 75 miles (120 km) to the west where Pell grew up and cut his teeth as a priest in the 1970s and 1980s.