AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By JOANNE McCARTHY March 28, 2014
CARDINAL George Pell has failed as a moral leader. Abysmally and absolutely.
He failed in 2004 and 2005, when he accepted John Ellis’s allegations he was sexually abused by a priest were true, but instructed lawyers to ‘‘vigorously’’ and ‘‘strenuously’’ defend the matter in court.
In Pell’s own words this week to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, from a ‘‘Christian point of view’’ the Church did not deal fairly with Ellis.
He failed again as a moral leader, repeatedly, when the Archdiocese of Sydney issued statements over the years defending the ‘‘key facts’’ of the Ellis case, while failing to mention its ‘‘mean’’ and ‘‘grotesque’’ initial offers of compensation to him under Towards Healing, its rejections of his offers to mediate and settle the action, and pursuit of Ellis over a $500,000 legal costs bill for several years, despite knowing of his fragile emotional state.
Pell failed as a moral leader again this week, when he blamed and minimised, justified and waffled his way through answers to the most basic of questions about what he did and did not do when Ellis turned to the Church with its ‘‘commitment to justice and compassion’’.
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