The Cardinal, Australia's highest ranking Catholic and the most senior Vatican official ever to have been charged with such offences, is entitled to the same presumption of innocence every person called upon to appear before the courts is owed.

He has co-operated fully with Australian police and has, consistently and vehemently, denied the allegations upon which the charges are based. The Cardinal has indicated he will return to Australia to defend himself subject to a travel clearance from his doctors.

A decision to lay charges should never be seen as indication of probable guilt. What it does indicate is that on the basis of evidence which has yet to be tested in the court room the authorities are of the view it is "more likely than not" to result in a successful prosecution.

History shows that on many occasions this confidence has been misplaced.

That said, Cardinal Pell, the former Archbishop of Melbourne and then Sydney, is no stranger to the Catholic Church's sad history in regard to the sexual abuse of young people in its schools, orphanages and other institutions.

He was already a senior churchman when these allegations first began to surface in the 1980s and 1990s and has long been dogged by an infamous picture of himself accompanying accused - and later convicted - paedophile priest Gerard Risdale to court in 1993.

Critics see him as emblematic of a dark time in the church's immediate past when its hierarchy was more concerned about protecting perpetrators and suppressing scandal than protecting the young people in its charge.

That era's sins of omission and commission were brought into the spotlight by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

The bitter taste this, and similar scandals involving other denominations and religions, has left is at least partly to blame for the sharp fall in the proportion of Australians professing to hold a faith in the recent census results.

This has also been mirrored in the fall in the number of Australians attending church services in recent decades.

Matters have not been helped by the fact that while many within the church have done much to act on the findings of the Royal Commission, others have been notably less enthusiastic about the changes.

One of the saddest things about the events of the last few decades has been the way in which it has overshadowed the many good works carried out by the Catholic Church.

Working through many different organisations and charities it continues to feed the hungry, house the homeless and provide support to many who would otherwise have nowhere else to turn.

These charges will no doubt further damage the church, regardless of the findings of the court.