AUSTRALIA
The Australian
DAN BOX THE AUSTRALIAN MARCH 13, 2014
A SENIOR Catholic Church official has contradicted the account given by Cardinal George Pell’s private secretary that the church had never accepted the truth of an abuse claim brought by the child victim of a Sydney priest.
The victim, John Ellis, first approached the church in 2002, saying he had been sexually abused for several years during the 1970s by Father Aidan Duggan, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has heard.
He initially attempted to resolve this through the church’s own “Towards Healing” process, the commission heard, before ultimately launching legal action in August 2004.
In a 2005 email to the church’s lawyers, Cardinal Pell’s secretary Michael Casey wrote “the final position which the Archdiocese came to was that it was not possible to make a determination that Fr Duggan had abused Ellis as alleged.”
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