One of the pope’s top advisors facing multiple charges of historical sex offences has arrived in his native Australia ahead of his first court appearance later this month.

Cardinal George Pell was driven away from Sydney airport early on Monday morning (July 10).

Pell is the highest-ranking Vatican official to be charged in the Catholic Church’s long-running sexual abuse scandal.

No specific details of the allegations have been released, but two men, now in their 40s have said that Cardinal Pell touched them inappropriately at a swimming poll in the late 1970s when Pell was a senior priest in Melbourne.

Pell has issued a statement in which he denies the charges. He has been ordered to appear in Melbourne’s Magistrates Court on July 18.