AUSTRALIA
The Australian
DAN BOX THE AUSTRALIAN MARCH 17, 2014
THE Catholic Church spent years disputing the account of an altar boy who claimed to have been sexually abused by a Sydney priest, despite having been told almost two decades earlier that the priest had abused another child.
The case, currently being investigated by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, sparked widespread controversy after the victim, John Ellis, lost his bid to sue the church in 2007.
Church documents tendered to the commission also show the priest, Aidan Duggan, worked as a chaplain in Sydney’s Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children and as “controller of a flourishing childcare centre” years after the first report of his abuse.
The Archdiocese of Sydney spent years contesting Mr Ellis’s claim to have been sexually abused during the 1970s on the basis that Duggan was too infirm to be interviewed and there was no record of any other allegation against him.
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