WOLLONGONG (AUSTRALIA)
Illawarra Mercury
February 12, 2018
By Ben Schneiders, Royce Millar, and Chris Vedelago
After a lifetime contributing to the Catholic Church, Neil Ormerod could give no more.
Following a Sunday mass in 2014, the Australian Catholic University theology professor told his parish priest he no longer trusted the church to use its resources in a way Jesus Christ would approve.
The trigger for his rebellion was the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2014 – in particular, Cardinal George Pell’s testimony about the church’s brutal legal assault on John Ellis, a former altar boy abused by a priest in the 1970s.
When Ellis finally confronted the Sydney archdiocese in 2002, then led by Pell, it offered him $25,000 in compensation, which he rejected.
The church then dismissed Ellis’s proposal for a $100,000 settlement, instead spending $800,000 fighting him in court, successfully arguing it could not be sued because it did not exist as an entity.
The church threatened to pursue Ellis for its legal costs.
“That money was the accumulated wealth of generations of good faithful Catholics who gave with the best will in the world,” says Ormerod. “It was used in an immoral attack on an abuse survivor and church member.”
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