CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Mourners paid their respects to Cardinal George Pell who lay in state in a Sydney cathedral on Wednesday as police sought a court docket order to stop protesters from disrupting his funeral.Pell, who was as soon as the third-highest rating cleric within the Vatican and spent greater than a yr in jail earlier than his little one abuse convictions had been overturned in 2020, died in Rome on Jan. 10 at age 81.The staunchly conservative church chief will lie in St. Mary’s Cathedral from Wednesday till he’s interred on the cathedral crypt after a funeral Mass the next day.The New South Wales Police Drive has rejected an utility from Sydney-based homosexual rights group Group Motion for Rainbow Rights for a allow to protest exterior the cathedral on Thursday because of security issues.Police utilized to the New South Wales Supreme Courtroom on Wednesday to ban the rally.Deputy Commissioner David Hudson mentioned police could not attain a compromise with organizers’ protest plans.“New South Wales Police isn’t against the subject that the protesters want to air. We definitely respect the correct of individuals to have the ability to protest and air their voices,” Hudson informed reporters.However a “variety of features” of the deliberate protest “current a danger to public security,” Hudson mentioned.Justice Peter Garling adjourned the listening to till later Wednesday to permit additional negotiations between police and activists over the proposed protest route.The homosexual rights group posted on social media a name for folks to affix what it calls its “Pell go to Hell!” protest.“We’d like everyone to come back out and protest on Thursday. We are able to’t let the police get away with denying us our proper to protest this bigot’s funeral!” the group mentioned.Pell was an outspoken and polarizing determine all through his church profession and stays divisive in his native Australia in dying.Protesters tied ribbons in reminiscence of victims of clergy abuse to the cathedral’s fence early Wednesday earlier than the doorways had been open to the general public.“Ribbon tying on church fences has turn out to be a visible image of those that have suffered abuse by the hands of the church and reminder that these crimes go largely unpunished,” activists posted.Church officers had eliminated such ribbons in current days, elevating accusations of disrespect towards victims. However a cathedral official informed protesters on Wednesday the place ribbons could possibly be positioned and the place they may not, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.Pell was archbishop of Sydney from 2001 till 2014 when Pope Francis appointed him to be the primary prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economic system tasked with reforming the Vatican’s notoriously opaque funds.Pell had been archbishop of Melbourne from 1996 to 2001, a interval throughout which he was alleged to have sexually abused two choirboys in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He was convicted then acquitted after a second enchantment.As church chief of Melbourne and later of Sydney, Pell repeatedly refused to present Communion to homosexual activists sporting rainbow-colored sashes.“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, and necessary penalties observe from this,” Pell informed a St. Mary’s congregation in 2002 after he first refused Communion to a homosexual activist in Sydney.Pell was additionally a lightning rod for disagreements over whether or not the Catholic Church has been correctly held to account for previous little one intercourse abuse.A nationwide inquiry into institutional responses to little one intercourse abuse present in 2017 that Pell knew of clergy molesting youngsters within the Nineteen Seventies and didn’t take enough motion to deal with it.Pell later mentioned in a press release he was “shocked” by the inquiry’s findings. “These views usually are not supported by proof,” Pell’s assertion mentioned.Pell and his supporters believed he was scapegoated for all of the crimes of the Australian Catholic Church’s botched response to clergy sexual abuse.Francis imparted a last blessing at Pell’s funeral Mass held at St. Peter’s Basilica on Jan. 14.Pell’s Pontifical Requiem Mass in Sydney on Thursday shall be livestreamed on the cathedral’s YouTube channel and televised on giant screens on the cathedral’s forecourt to accommodate anticipated giant numbers of mourners, church officers mentioned.