After 4½ hours, the questioning was beginning to touch on the difference between moral and legal responsibility and the 73-year-old recently decamped Archbishop of Sydney had begun to be probed about why he had not settled with John Ellis, abused by his Bass Hill parish priest for nearly 10 years.

Mr Ellis had grown up into a well-rewarded lawyer and had rejected a $25,000 church offer of compensation and was demanding $750,000. ''Because it was not a good legal position,'' Cardinal Pell said, to explain why he had accepted advice not to settle.

Gail Furness, the senior counsel assisting the commission, turned to him and asked: ''But you are a church man, aren't you, father?''

A slight pause ensued as the cardinal went back to his everyday job. But then it is not every day that a prince of the Church of Rome bows to the state, even if it was on the 17th floor of the Governor Macquarie Tower, a few floors below the level where Barry O'Farrell runs the state of NSW and a stone's throw from where the British sovereign established her seat of authority, the colony's first Government House.

Cardinal Pell's appearance was always going to be the commission's show stopper.

He arrived in a Honda sedan two hours before he was due to give evidence at 10am and slipped unobtrusively into the car park. Cardinal Pell, for many, has become the symbol of how powerful institutions closed ranks against allegations that their clerics, schools and homes sheltered unknown numbers of pedophiles.

On Monday, scores awaited his arrival, gathering under banners and posters like, ''The Cruel Cardinal'', ''Suffer the Little Children'', ''Catholic priests Pell and Risdale MATES.''

They yelled as Cardinal Pell materialised from the car park and followed him up to the hearing.

Victims such as Mr Ellis and his wife Nicola and Chrissie and Anthony Foster, whose two daughters were abused by a priest, waited patiently for Pell to take the witness box. One woman's T-shirt declared: ''I don't recall - How much money has Catholic church kept from sex abuse victims.''

Victims and supporters provided a sort of Greek chorus to Cardinal Pell's comments. They even clapped at a point made by Ms Furness.

Normally a magisterial speaker, Cardinal Pell delivered his testimony in a quiet, disciplined voice, slightly thickened thanks to a cold that he struggled to stymie with a handkerchief. Over his testimony his complexion went from a Roman autumn pink to a light rose.

Five giant television screens beamed down correspondence between Cardinal Pell and his administrators and Mr Ellis's graphic written statement of what Father Aidan Duggan had done to him.

At 3pm, Cardinal Pell was explaining how he had been misled by one of his lieutenants and admitted: ''I should have done more'' about Mr Ellis when John Hennessy, of the Child Migrants Trust, stepped into the aisle and held up a large photograph of his late British mother, May Mary Hennessy, who was told he was dead before he was shipped to a Christian Brothers institution in Western Australia.

''You should be ashamed of yourself, Cardinal,'' he said before apologising to the commissioner, Justice Peter McClellan.

Cardinal Pell will resume his evidence on Wednesday.

Ellis defence

The Ellis defence emerged from John Ellis's attempt to sue the Catholic Church for damages for sexual abuse he suffered as a 13-year-old altar boy in the 1970s.

The Sydney Archdiocese argued its only legal entity, its property trust, could not be held liable for the abuse, a claim upheld in the NSW Court of Appeal in 2007.

It also argued the Archbishop could not be sued if he was not in charge when it occurred. Cardinal Pell gave evidence he did not believe the assertion church could not be sued. His statement says the church ''should be able to be sued in cases of this kind''.