AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
March 27, 2014
Damien Murphy
”Do you understand now from your learning in the area of the effect and impact of child sexual abuse that the impact it had on John Ellis to have the very church he had gone back to dispute that he had ever been abused?”
The rain outside had streaked the windows with tears when Gail Furness, senior counsel assisting the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse suddenly turned the Catholic Church into a perpetrator.
In the public gallery, Mr Ellis, a man who long ago had been abused by his parish priest, raised a hand to his face like a shield and watched Cardinal George Pell start his penance without reconciliation.
Cardinal Pell, as the former Catholic archbishop of Sydney, had sanctioned a legal strategy that refused to recognise Mr Ellis had been abused, offered him derisory financial compensation, refused his offers of a settlement in the belief it would cause a rush of litigants demanding massive compensation payouts, and subjected him to a long demeaning legal case that eventually left him bankrupt.
Cardinal Pell: ”I regret that.”
Ms Furness: ”Only regret, Cardinal?”
Cardinal Pell: ”What else could I say. It was wrong that it [the court cross-examination of Mr Ellis] went to such an extent. I was told it was a legally proper tactic, strategy.”
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