AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
March 27, 2014
Damien Murphy
”Do you understand now from your learning in the area of the effect and impact of child sexual abuse that the impact it had on John Ellis to have the very church he had gone back to dispute that he had ever been abused?”
The rain outside had streaked the windows with tears when Gail Furness, senior counsel assisting the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse suddenly turned the Catholic Church into a perpetrator.
In the front row of the public gallery, John Ellis, a man long ago abused by his parish priest, raised his left hand to his face like a shield as Cardinal George Pell began.
Cardinal Pell, as Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, had sanctioned a legal strategy that refused to recognise Mr Ellis had been abused, offered him derisory financial compensation and refused his offers of a settlement in the belief it would cause a rush of litigants demanding compensation payouts and subjected him to a long, demeaning legal case that left him bankrupt.
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