George Pell’s appeal against his sentence has just been rejected by the Victorian Court of Appeal.
Pell will stay in jail for at least another three years. He is expected to take his case to the High Court.
The decision was reached by a majority of two to one.
WATCH: George Pell’s attempt to overturn the verdict.
The former Archbishop of Sydney and Melbourne was sentenced to six years in prison.
There he is to serve a minimum of three years and eight months.
In June, he appealed the guilty verdict, but not the sentence.
Cardinal Pell was the most senior Catholic priest ever convicted of child sex crimes
Cardinal Pell had been found guilty of sexually penetrating a child under the age of 16 as well as four charges of an indecent act with a minor.
Judge Peter Kidd told the courts that the 77-year-old was “brazen”.
He said, “you were confident your victims would not complain.”
“The offending which the jury has found you have engaged in was, on any view, breathtakingly arrogant,” the judge told Pell – saying he had committed a “grave abuse of his power.”
The criminal offences involving two choirboys – who the judge referred to as ‘R’ and ‘J’ – occurred between December 1996 and early 1997 at St Patrick’s Cathedral, months after Pell was inaugurated as archbishop of Melbourne’s Catholic church.
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