AUSTRALIA
SBS
AAP
The country is waiting to hear from Cardinal George Pell what he really meant when he said victims should be able to sue the church in abuse cases.
Is it all incense and mirrors or has the veteran Catholic warhorse George Pell dropped the drawbridge to let thousands of abuse victims storm the legal battlements of the church?
The cardinal takes the stand at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse sometime next week, but commission counsel Gail Furness SC has already given a brief insight into what he’ll say.
Ms Furness this week read a few lines from a 23-page opening statement, stating that Dr Pell held the view victims in cases “of this kind” should be able to sue the church in Australia grabbed attention.
Ms Furness was laying out the facts for a two-week hearing into how the Archdiocese of Sydney under Dr Pell handled complaints by John Ellis in 2002 that he had been abused as an altar boy by a priest in Bass Hill, Sydney, about 28 years earlier.
Dr Pell’s apparent “backflip”, “change of heart” and “volte face” stole the headlines and led to speculation the church would change its structure to make itself a legal entity that could be sued.
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