Sydney Morning Herald
August 15, 2008
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/forgive-them-father/2008/08/15/1218307227891.html
Cardinal George Pell's determination to deny compensation to an abuse victim was uncompromising, writes Erik Jensen.
The cardinal was not budging. Anthony Jones, a religion teacher at a Catholic high school in Sydney's south when he claimed he was the victim of attempted rape by a Catholic priest 26 years ago, would be offered no church compensation. Not a cent.
According to correspondence seen by the Herald, George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, took the Jones case particularly personally, rejecting internal advice that payment be made. He was not at all concerned by negative publicity, of which there would be plenty at a time most sensitive to the Catholic Church - the eve of the Pope's visit to Sydney in July to celebrate World Youth Day. Just why Pell dug in his heels so emphatically is not explained, but the Jones scandal soured at least the entree to a feast that should have been the church's unmitigated blessing.
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| "No one is able to get justice" … Anthony Jones in northern NSW this week. Photo by Paul Harris |
First, some background. Jones was 29 in January 1982 when he was fondled by a local priest, Terence Goodall, who then attempted to have sex with him. Jones claims he reported the incident to the church within a month and, 20 years later, when nothing had been done, he again wrote a formal complaint to the church.
That sparked an internal church investigation of Goodall. A second complaint against Goodall, received from a victim who cannot be named because he was a minor at the time of the offence, was included in the investigation.
Contrary to his investigator's advice, Pell wrote to Jones on February 14, 2003, advising him that his complaint was unproved, and that no other allegation of sexual assault had been made against Goodall. On the same day, Pell wrote to the second victim upholding his complaint.
Three months later, Jones reported his allegations to the police and, in January 2005, Goodall was sentenced in the District Court on a single count of indecent assault under a law that prohibited homosexuality until it was repealed in 1984 - two years after the assault on Jones. Goodall did not testify and was free to go at the end of the court proceedings.
Civil action by Jones against Goodall and Pell reached the Supreme Court this year. It ended without judgment, with each party bearing its own costs.
Jones's allegation of assault and attempted rape had been the subject of two investigations - a church inquiry in which he was never interviewed and a police investigation that never questioned Goodall.
When charges were brought they did not deal with the issue of consent, though a judge and a magistrate each speculated on its relevance. The man who sentenced the priest to the rising of the court did so on law he himself had been charged under.
"It's left me a very damaged man, a man who hates the Catholic Church for what it stands for," Jones said this week from his home at Blue Knob, in far northern NSW. "It's total evil, total lies, and no one is able to get justice."
In the hothouse of international Catholic attention on Sydney in July, Pell admitted he had erred in dismissing Jones's claim. But not before Jones's brief day in court - June 16, when an order was given to neuter any hope of compensation. With legal costs apparently above $200,000, the cardinal's lawyers wrote to Jones's offering a walk-away. There was to be no admission of liability and no money exchanged. Pell would be released from all matters related to the case.
Jones settled, meeting his own legal costs. He had been explicitly threatened with the forced sale of his home to meet legal costs, despite a psychiatric report warning such a move might trigger his suicide. Within three weeks, the story was front-page news.
Throughout the case, the church has struggled with the same issue: "It was difficult at the outset to know whether the homosexual encounter was consensual," Pell explained through a spokesman this month. "Mr Jones was 29 at the time."
The case came across Pell's desk on January 13, 2003. Until this point, consent had not stood out as an issue of contention. The church's initial response, seen by the Herald, upheld Jones's claim that he was fondled by Goodall, who then tried to rape him. It made no reference to consent and noted compensation might be paid even if the church was not legally liable. The letter is attributed to Pell, but was never signed and never sent.
"I note that Fr Goodall readily admitted to the two alleged incidents in January 1982 regarding Mr Tony Jones," the assistant to the chancellor, Dominic Cudmore, wrote in an attached memorandum. "Your Grace will note recommendations of [the church investigator] Mr Howard Murray … that both Messrs Jones and [the second Goodall victim] be informed in writing that their allegations have been sustained and appropriate follow-up action will be taken to provide any necessary remedial assistance."
There are notes scribbled in the memorandum's margin, and the final line, recommending Pell sign the attached letters, has been scratched out. In its place is a single sentence, written in the first person: "I liaise with Mr Davoren [the church's director of professional standards] regarding the wording of letters to Messrs Jones and [the other victim]."
A month later, Pell wrote to the two victims, with two very different conclusions. "It gets down to one person's word against the other," he wrote in relation to the Jones's claim, "with no way in law of being able to decide which version is the more accurate."
Three months later, recovering from his second nervous breakdown, Jones reported the abuse to police.
A Lismore detective, Dave Mackie, headed the criminal investigation. He took the formal statement, sought the warrant for the listening device and decided the charges. Over the next few years, his would become one of the more controversial homosexual prosecutions of the past decade.
Mackie does not recall what motivated him to charge Goodall under the old statute that outlawed homosexual sex, with or without consent. He says it is possible he was interested in removing the issue of consent from his burden of proof and would have found the charges in a book of retrospective legislation at the station. He is not homophobic, he says. The charges were not political. Repealed law can still be used if the alleged offence occurred before the repeal.
"That was my decision to charge him with that. Those charges were based on the information Jones gave me," he says.
The account Jones gave Mackie was the same account he had put in his letter to the church. He had met Goodall at a dinner with friends and gone to hear his Mass the following day. Afterwards, they shared a Chinese meal. A swim was suggested, trunks borrowed. When they got to the pool, Goodall came behind Jones, slid his hand into the front of his swimmers and fondled him for half a minute. Jones is said to have the emotional development of a 14-year-old.
Jones then drove back with the priest to the presbytery to retrieve his clothes. There was no conversation. Upstairs, Goodall asked him to sit on a bed. He pushed him against the mattress then lay on top of him, thrusting against him. There was no kissing and Jones did not move during the episode. Goodall ejaculated.
Having dressed, Jones went home and woke the next morning with a rash between his legs.
Twenty-one years later - in 2003 - Jones sat beside Mackie at the Lismore police station and telephoned Goodall. Mackie had not decided whether to charge Goodall but had coached Jones before the conversation and asked him to talk about consent.
That this was a subject of the conversation suggests Mackie was either considering a case on contemporary law or was ignorant of the nature of the repealed anti-homosexual charges. He cannot remember which.
Either way, Jones did as he was coached.
"And do you believe that at the time it was consensual?" he asked Goodall, who replied: "No, I don't think so, no."
"And you can categorically say to me that you do not believe that it was a consensual act on my part?" asked Jones.
"No," replied Goodall, "I think, I, I think not, no, definitely not."
The case, charging Goodall with indecent assault and attempted buggery, reached a committal hearing in June 2004. It is remembered today by a yellow folder on the third floor of the Downing Centre. "File to be kept while WYD [World Youth Day] is on," a note affixed to the cover reads. "Upon instruction."
In summing up committal proceedings, the initial magistrate, Terrance Forbes, strayed from the charges. He had lost his notes and, after a lunchtime recess, was speaking off the cuff. It was not clear consent should be excluded from proceedings, though its exclusion would later be used by the church to defend its mishandling of the affair.
"If you want to have the issue of consent as part of this, he [the victim] says without consent," the magistrate said. "Does the cross-examination totally destroy the complaint that this occurred? I would say to you that the only inference that you could draw is that no it does not … The accused person says that he did take sexual advantage of the complainant in the pool and the presbytery on this particular night."
Six months later, the sentencing judge, Philip Bell, looked again at the issue - this time stating that the case would need to be expanded. "A trial of this matter today would involve considerations of evidence more expanded than the facts before this court," he said. "I accept that proposition."
Bell was familiar with the repealed laws. He was arrested under them in 1966 - hauled out of an eastern suburbs toilet block, fingerprinted and then released. The charges were withdrawn. In sentencing Goodall to symbolic incarceration - a rising of the court, on a statement of agreed facts and the lesser charge of indecent assault - he noted that the defence had pushed for no conviction and the Crown had sought no prison time.
Bell pointed to significant good character as a mitigating factor. Goodall's prospects of rehabilitation and unlikelihood of re-offending were both noted without hesitation and in the highest degree. But these findings were in direct contrast to the outcome of a psychosexual review carried out by the church, which found Goodall to be an "ongoing risk factor" whose rehabilitation should be only for personal reasons and not for readmission to the ministry.
Submissions about the charge negotiation were read by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, before the case. This was not unusual, a spokeswoman said, and nor was it an indication the matter received special treatment. The line from his office has remained constant: "The charges laid were those that were for offences that existed at the time and were most appropriate for the acts that occurred. These acts were criminal offences when the incident occurred in 1982."
All this has been useful to a church hierarchy that has sought from the outset to dismiss Jones and his claims. That task, it seems, has been a success.
"It was beneficial to the church later to be able to look back and say the [Director of Public Prosecutions] only got the conviction on the lesser charge," says Jones's lawyer, Peter Karp. "The charges they used could have been for two homosexuals found in the back of Centennial Park. But they were not used for two homosexuals down the back of Centennial Park - one was the aggressor."
Pell released his first statement on the case on Tuesday, July 8, this year. "The letter to Mr Jones was badly worded and a mistake - an attempt to inform him there was no other allegation of rape," he wrote. "… Any fault in the drafting was mine."
By Thursday, after four days of press scrutiny and a week before the Pope's official arrival, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney announced a review panel. In announcing it, Pell noted that the courts had dealt with Jones. The panel was convened out of consideration for the victim and to examine "the matters raised this week" - matters the church had known about for at least two years.
A letter from Pell arrived in Jones's letterbox earlier this week. It was the first correspondence from the cardinal since 2005, when he had written to defend his handling of the matter.
It offered an apology for his February 2003 letter and proposed a meeting. There was no mention of compensation.
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