AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 10 March 2014)
Australia’s national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is examining a 2007 civil legal case, in which Cardinal George Pell’s legal team crushed one of the church’s Sydney victims, former altar-boy John Ellis. This Pell victory (known as “the Ellis Defence”) later helped the Catholic Church to avoid paying proper compensation to victims throughout Australia. But now, as Pell departs Australia for a top job at the Vatican, he admits that Australian victims should be allowed to sue the church.
On Monday 10 March 2014, the Commission was told that Pell has submitted a written statement, suggesting that the church might have to surrender, allowing victims to sue the church after all.
The Royal Commission is examining the original complaint made by John Ellis under the church’s internal Towards Healing process “and the circumstances in which the Catholic Church raised what is commonly referred to as the ‘Ellis Defence”’.
The Sydney victim, John Ellis, had been a 14-year-old altar boy in a suburban parish in 1975, when he was sexually abused by a serial pedophile, Father Aidan Duggan. The abuse (and the church’s breach of trust) seriously damaged John Ellis’s adolescence and his later personal and working life when he was practising as a solicitor during his twenties and thirties.
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