George Pell versus the church's victims (the

Broken Rites
March 2, 2014

http://brokenrites.org.au/drupal/node/280

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 later helped the Catholic Church to avoid, or limit, paying compensation to many victims in other parts of Australia. The church's evasive strategy became known as  the "Ellis Defence", although it could be called (perhaps more appropriately) the "Pell Defence".

Commission chief executive Janette Dines said in a public statement early in 2014 that 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 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.

In 2002, John Ellis (then aged 40) contacted the Catholic Church's "Towards Healing" office, lodging a formal complaint about how the Sydney archdiocese has disrupted his life and his career by its action giving Father Duggan easy access to children. The archdiocese (through its Towards Healing office) offered John Ellis a relatively small financial settlement, on the condition that he would sign away his right to tackle the archdiocese for the kind of amount that any other corporation would be obliged to pay to a damaged person. 

The Sydney archdiocese's draft settlement document indicated that the Towards Healing offer was being made on behalf of:

1. Archbishop George Pell (for the Sydney Archdiocese); and
2. the Trustees of the Sydney Archdiocese.

John Ellis refused to accept this Towards Healing offer and decided, instead, to tackle the archdiocese in the New South Wales Supreme Court for a more appropriate sum to cover the loss of his  professional earnings - and to teach the archdiocese a lesson about its covering up of clergy sexual abuse. In naming the defendants, Mr Ellis cited the names of the same parties who had been listed by the church in its proposed Towards Healing settlement deed - that is Archbishop  George Pell and the Trustees of the Sydney Archdiocese.

In 2006 the Supreme Court granted permission for the "Ellis-versus-Pell"  case to proceed in court, but the archdiocese successfully applied to the NSW Court of  Appeal.

In 2007 the Appeal Court ruled that Archbishop Pell had no personal liability for historical abuse committed by Father Duggan. Thus, the church's defence strategy (now known as the "Ellis Defence") defeated John Ellis's action.

The Sydney archdiocese paid massive fees to its lawyers to win this legal victory over John Ellis but the archdiocese regarded these fees as money well spent, expecting (correctly) that this precedent would help the church to evade (or, at least, to limit) its liability towards other Catholic Church victims. Legal experts believe that the church's "Ellis Defence" (or, rather, the Pell Defence) has saved the church millions of dollars throughout Australia.

The church's Ellis Defence established a precedent that “the church itself doesn’t exist as a legal entity in Australia” and therefore cannot be sued.

The church’s property trusts, which control large financial assets, do legally exist, but the Appeal Court's ruling means the church can successfully claim that "our clergy are not employees and the church is not liable for their criminal conduct."

And Broken Rites understands that, likewise, the trustees can claim evasively that "the trustees don't appoint  the priests to their parishes."

The Ellis Defence, which has no direct parallel in Britain, the United States or Canada, means that Australian church-victims are forced to accept far smaller compensation payments from the Catholic Church than they might have otherwise received.

Many lawyers say that, if any flaw or weakness is identified in the church’s "Ellis Defence" during the Royal Commission's hearings, this would open a fresh round of compensation claims, potentially costing the church tens of millions of dollars.

The Royal Commission has heard that at least 1,700 of the church's Australian victims have previously agreed to take part in the Towards Healing process. Many of these victims received an inadequate financial settlement.

In February 2014, it was announced that Cardinal George Pell is moving from Sydney to Rome to take charge of the Vatican's corporate finances. Therefore, Broken Rites suggests that, now that Pell has got his hands on the Vatican cheque book, it might be a good time for him to recompense the poor souls whose lives have been damaged by church sexual abuse.