When Healing Becomes Hell on Earth, Sydney Morning Herald, July 16, 2010

When Healing Becomes Hell on Earth

Sydney Morning Herald
July 16, 2010

http://www.smh.com.au/national/when-healing-becomes-hell-on-earth-20100716-10e7b.html

Faith tested ... John Ellis received an apology from Cardinal Pell after the missive. Photo by Steven Siewert

A church program is meant to help victims of priestly abuse, but many leave more scarred than ever, writes Jacqueline Maley.

It was Christmas Eve, 2002, and John Ellis was preparing for the holiday. As a Catholic, it was still an important religious festival to him, even though his faith had been tested by the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Father Aidan Duggan of the Bass Hill parish, some 35 years before.

Then a letter arrived from the Sydney Archbishop George Pell. It said there was no way his abuse claim could be substantiated, as Father Duggan was demented and ''in no state to respond to the charges against him''.

''I regret that a clear resolution of this matter is not possible, but under the circumstances I do not see that there is anything the Archdiocese can do towards this end,'' Dr Pell wrote.

This letter, Ellis says, ruined Christmas. The 49-year-old solicitor had spent the entire year in Towards Healing, the protocol created by the church in 1996 to deal with abuse complaints in all states except Victoria.

As revelations of sex abuse and church cover-ups continue to claim clerical scalps around the world, this is the high moral ground on which the Australian church has rested: it led the world in dealing with abuse complaints. But many victims emerge from Towards Healing worse for wear. They say the system is irregular, unprofessional and focused on limiting the church's liability.

Its investigators are not empowered to determine if any church authorities turned a blind eye to abuse or helped conceal it.

Its sanctions are also questionable. Father Finian Egan, a retired Irish-born priest subject to a Towards Healing investigation involving the alleged abuse of girls at Carlingford, has ministered at weddings and funerals since that investigation. A church newsletter recently congratulated him on the 50th anniversary of his ordination. He is now the subject of a police investigation.

Despite Cardinal Pell's discouraging Christmas letter, the church later found Ellis's claim substantiated on the balance of probabilities, but only after he had read his rights under the Towards Healing protocol and insisted an investigator be appointed.

Cardinal Pell later apologised. He told the Herald through a spokeswoman that the Archdiocese continues to meet with Ellis and to provide him with financial and pastoral support.

Ellis says he was told by Michael Salmon, the respected head of the NSW branch of the Office of Professional Standards, his abuser ''had no form''. But since Ellis's Towards Healing process ended, two men have told him they were abused by Duggan at a Scottish boarding school before he moved to Australia. A Scottish woman told him her husband and his brother were abused by the late priest at the same Fort Augustus school.

Ellis was eventually offered $30,000 in compensation on the condition he sign a letter absolving the church of further liability. He refused the offer and took his case to court, losing in the NSW Court of Appeal. He was refused leave to appeal to the High Court.

The now-famous ''Ellis decision'' means in many cases there is no authority legally responsible for priest appointments. The NSW Court of Appeal found the trustees in each diocese in NSW and ACT were not responsible for the conduct of priests and teachers in parochial schools at least prior to 1986, when the relevant legislation was amended. The post-1986 position has not yet been tested under the law.

This means that in NSW at least, victims can often find no legal entity to sue. Because of this legal technicality, the church is often not liable for its employees in the way a school or a company would be.

It doesn't have to be this way. This week the Toowoomba Bishop William Morris accepted on behalf of his diocese formal liability for the actions of a paedophile teacher it employed. It remains to be seen if other dioceses will follow suit.

Peter Gogarty, 49, an outspoken abuse victim from Vacy, a small town near the Hunter Valley, says Towards Healing is a misnomer.

He was sexually abused by the late paedophile priest Jim Fletcher for six years in the mid-1970s. While he was abusing Gogarty, Fletcher shared a house with Philip Wilson, then a young priest, now the Archbishop of Adelaide and president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

''I would be sneaked through the back door of the house and would often bump into [Wilson] in the kitchen,'' Gogarty recalls. Archbishop Wilson said he had no knowledge at all of Fletcher's behaviour.

In 2006, Fletcher was jailed for 12 years and Gogarty plucked up the courage to approach the church through Towards Healing. ''I was guaranteed someone would contact me within 48 hours,'' he says. ''A week later I hadn't heard anything so I went back to them. It was off to a bad start.''

Not until Gogarty's case was taken over by the specialist Child Protection and Professional Conduct Unit within the Maitland-Newcastle diocese was any progress made.

Bishop Michael Malone issued a formal apology and Gogarty accepted compensation of $30,000, on the condition he sign a confidentiality agreement, which he has repeatedly breached.

Gogarty considered civil action, but with his abuser dead, and the bishop at the time retired, it was difficult to know whom to sue. The Ellis decision presented a big legal obstacle.

''I get this sense that [Towards Healing] is about controlling victims and getting them to sign a disclaimer. It's a tick-the-box process that's about shutting people up,'' he says. A third victim, 49, who wishes to remain anonymous, was 11 years old in 1971 when he was violently sexually assaulted by a priest at a Jesuit prep school in Melbourne.

His complaint was substantiated, but not until he went through his school yearbook and gave the investigator the names of his classmates, on the off chance they knew something.

The assessor - whose investigations he says were stymied by the Jesuits - discovered one classmate was preparing to lodge a complaint against the same priest.

But despite being substantiated, the question of reparations is still unresolved. ''My experience of the process is it's designed to limit the financial liability of the church and to deter complainants from pursuing other means of redress like litigation,'' he says.

''There is also a lack of transparency. They're extremely secretive. You don't know if five people have been through it or 500.''

Sister Angela Ryan, the head of the national bureau of the Professional Standards Office, says the process has been refined since 1996, and was most recently reviewed in January by Professor Patrick Parkinson, a family law and child protection specialist at the University of Sydney. The church keeps no central statistics on the process, she says.

A statement from Cardinal Pell's office said: ''Towards Healing is designed … to bring justice and healing to those who have been abused.''

But Helen Last, of the victims advocate group In Good Faith, says ad-hoc co-operation is not enough. ''There's no responsibility taken by the hierarchy to monitor these men,'' she says. ''There is no capacity at all for systemic review. They will never look inward, only outward towards the victim.''