AUSTRALIA
The Age
May 18, 2015
Chris Vedelago, Cameron Houston
The Catholic Church will continue to use a controversial legal defence to block victims of clerical abuse from seeking compensation, despite a promise to abandon the practice having been backed by Cardinal George Pell.
The church’s backflip comes as the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse sits today for a three-week hearing into decades of horrific abuse in the Diocese of Ballarat.
Fairfax Media can reveal a major rift between the country’s most influential bishops, religious orders and their insurers over the continued use of the so-called Ellis defence, which was supposedly disavowed in April 2014.
The internal ructions have prompted the church’s senior adviser on its response to the royal commission, Francis Sullivan, to call for church lawyers to “get with the program” and renounce the controversial legal precedent.
“Church leadership is about leading, not being led about by the nose by lawyers. That’s really what the royal commission is demonstrating to us,” Mr Sullivan said.
The Ellis defence is based on a 2007 NSW Court of Appeal decision that found the church cannot be sued for compensation because it does not technically exist as a legal entity.
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