AUSTRALIA
Sky News
A senior Catholic Church official has denied he contrived a tactic to support the church’s legal dispute that former altar boy John Ellis was never abused.
Michael Casey had been asked by then archbishop, Cardinal George Pell, to check whether or not the internal church process had found in favour of Mr Ellis’s complaint of abuse by a priest at Bass Hill in Sydney in the 1970s.
Dr Casey, Cardinal Pell’s private secretary, told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse he was shown a June 2005 email from him to the church legal team which said the church-appointed assessor did find ‘on the balance of probabilities’ Mr Ellis was abused by Father Aidan Duggan.
However, the email went on to say that the director of the Public Standards Office, Michael Salmon, had mentioned there were reservations about Mr Ellis’s evidence and that as such the church authority had discretion to reject the assessor’s findings.
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