SYDNEY — Judges will rule next week on Australian Cardinal George Pell's appeal against multiple child sex abuse charges, court officials announced Thursday.

Pell, 78, the former Vatican number three, was sentenced in March to six years in prison for sexually assaulting two choirboys in the 1990s.

A three-judge panel of Victoria state's Supreme Court has been deliberating since hearing his appeal in early June.

The judges, who will give their verdict on August 21, can decide to reject the appeal, order a retrial or acquit Pell, the Catholic Church's most senior convicted child molester.

Pell was convicted of sexually abusing the two choirboys after Sunday Mass at St Patrick's Cathedral in 1996 and 1997 when he was Archbishop of Melbourne.

His lawyers raised 13 objections to his conviction on five counts of sexual abuse, arguing it was "physically impossible" for the cleric to have committed the crimes in a crowded cathedral.

They cast doubt on everything from the timing of the incident following Sunday services to whether he would have been able to move his cumbersome archbishop's robes easily enough to commit the assaults.

The appeal maintains that the case against Pell was unreasonably dependent on the testimony of a single victim -- the other died of a drug overdose in 2014 -- and fell short of proving his guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Prosecutors insisted the jury verdict against the one-time top Vatican official was "unimpeachable".

Legal expert Jeremy Gans, a professor at the University of Melbourne, told AFP he believed Pell was "likely but not certain" to win the appeal as the case was "not typical" for its heavy reliance on one person's testimony.

"Although that is a problem in most historical child sex abuse cases, it's more of a problem in this case than most of them," Gans said.

"More typically everything mostly rests on one person but there's other [evidence]."

If Pell wins the appeal, Gans said, his fall from grace and months spent in prison could provide "some solace" to his detractors, but the ruling was set to provoke controversy regardless.

"It's clear that no matter what the ruling of the court is, there will be people very angry on one side or another," he said. — AFP