AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
March 17, 2014
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
A senior Catholic Church official has admitted he swore a “deceptive” and wrong affidavit for court proceedings in the John Ellis case, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to child sex abuse has heard.
The Archdiocese’s Chancellor, Monsignor Brian Rayner, apologised that an affidavit he swore in the court proceedings in 2004 was “deceptive”. He agreed he had information about the abuser Father Aidan Duggan’s appointments to the parish of Bass Hill between 1974 and 1978. Yet he had signed an affidavit conveying the impression the church had no evidence Father Duggan was at Bass Hill during the years Mr Ellis alleged he was abusing him there except for 1975. “If the affidavit is deceptive then I regret that aspect,” Monsignor Rayner said. He said he did not prepare it and did not read it carefully nor take the opportunity to correct it.
Sixteen years after they last had sexual contact, the former altar boy Mr Ellis visited Duggan at the Little Sisters of the Poor Nursing Home at Randwick.
The church had used the excuse that Duggan was too far gone in senile dementia to answer allegations against him as a basis for treating Mr Ellis’ claim of abuse as “uncorroborated”.
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