AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)
Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Friday 21 March 2014
The Catholic church continued to dispute former altar boy John Ellis was abused even though it had evidence that supported his claim, a senior church official has told an inquiry.
Cardinal George Pell’s private secretary Dr Michael Casey told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse he accepted the church should not have continued to dispute Ellis’s credibility in the supreme court.
The hearing in its second week is looking at how the church handled the complaint of Ellis, who was abused by a priest at Bass Hill in Sydney between 1974 and 1979.
Earlier evidence showed that the church accepted Ellis was a victim of abuse when he went through the internal process, and the veracity of his allegations was supported by a church-appointed independent assessor.
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