AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Lucy Carter and staff
Cardinal George Pell and the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese repeatedly failed in their dealings with abuse victim John Ellis, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has found.
Early last year, the commission examined the treatment of Mr Ellis, a Sydney lawyer and former altar boy who, as a teenager, was abused by Father Aidan Duggan between 1974 and 1979.
Mr Ellis later spent more than a decade seeking compensation but lost the case on a technicality in 2007 when the Court of Appeal ruled the Catholic Church was not an entity that could be sued.
He had asked for $100,000 after he first came forward with a complaint through the church’s Towards Healing pastoral and redress scheme in 2002, but was offered $30,000, a sum Cardinal Pell later described as “grotesque”.
The commission heard that the church spent more than $1 million over 12 years fighting Mr Ellis’s claim, denying in court that the abuse had happened and threatening him with court costs for several years.
The Archdiocese failed to conduct the litigation with Mr Ellis in a manner that adequately took account of his pastoral and other needs as a victim of sexual abuse.
Cardinal Pell was Archbishop of Sydney at the time of Mr Ellis’s legal battle and later apologised to him, admitting the church failed in its moral and pastoral responsibilities and, “from a Christian point of view”, did not act fairly.
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