AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)
David Marr
theguardian.com, Tuesday 18 March 2014
Claims by Cardinal George Pell that he had little to do with the conduct of the notorious Ellis case have been flatly contradicted by the church’s own lawyer in dramatic testimony on Tuesday to the royal commission into the institutional response to child abuse.
“I didn’t have any doubt the cardinal was being kept up to date on developments in the case,” Paul McCann of church lawyers Corrs, Chambers, Westgarth told the commission. “He was giving instructions on various steps.”
John Ellis sued Pell and the trustees of the Catholic church in 2005 after being refused compensation for his abuse at the hands of Father Aidan Duggan. After a hard-fought contest, Ellis lost. The decision made legal history, confirming the Catholic church in Australia is unsueable. For years the church demanded Ellis pay its legal costs of $750,000.
When a frail Ellis met Pell for the first time in 2009, he came away immensely relieved to think the cardinal had not been “in the loop” when decisions were made on fighting his case. After the meeting, the cardinal’s secretary, Dr Michael Casey, wrote to Ellis apologising for the rough time he had had during the litigation.
“Cardinal Pell wants you to know that although he believed that your claim was for many millions of dollars, he now knows that the truth of the matter was … an “offer of compromise” submitted to the Archdiocese in December 2004 of only $750,000.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.