Cardinal Pell presses survivor to withdraw allegations made in ‘60 Minutes’ interview – BishopAccountability.org responds

By Anne Barrett Doyle
BishopAccountability.org
June 8, 2015

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/

[video: Cardinal Pell]

Cardinal Pell’s lawyer reportedly has sent a letter to survivor and papal commission member Peter Saunders, accusing him of making “false allegations” about Pell’s response to abuse victims and ‘inviting’ Saunders to withdraw the statements.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

The cardinal’s apparent attempt to intimidate Saunders is inappropriate. That the Vatican's third most powerful official would act with implied menace against a survivor who is serving Pope Francis and the church with such generosity and whole-heartedness supports the main point made by Saunders in his controversial interview – that Pell is unfit to hold a senior position in an administration ostensibly dedicated to survivor outreach and child protection.

The next move belongs to Pope Francis: the credibility of his promise of ‘bishop accountability’ is at stake.

Unless Saunders is defended against Pell by the pope or by a papal representative, like commission president Cardinal Sean O’Malley, other commission members will be silenced and discouraged, and the public’s confidence in the group's integrity will be undermined.

Pope Francis must rebuke Pell and insist that he immediately withdraw his threatening approach to Saunders. The pope should then take this opportunity to launch a review of the evidence of Pell’s harshness towards victims that has emerged in two government inquiries in Australia.

Last July, Saunders and five other survivors attended a private Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, where he made the first promise by any pope to hold bishops accountable for preventing sexual abuse by clergy. The pope said, “All bishops must carry out their pastoral ministry with the utmost care in order to help foster the protection of minors, and they will be held accountable.”

[Vatican Information Service]

The only meaningful measure of the sincerity of the pope's historic vow will be whether he removes church officials who fall short of his "utmost care" standard. Disciplining such powerful colleagues as Pell will be politically tough, but for the pope to make good on his promise, accountability must begin at the top. Diocesan bishops cannot be expected to comply with standards that Vatican officials have ignored with impunity.

And Pell's strike against Peter Saunders is nothing new for the Australian prelate: he has a documented history of using legal tactics to silence assertive survivors. No case documents this more thoroughly than his treatment of survivor John Ellis when Pell was archbishop of Sydney. Ellis had been sodomized and molested for years, starting when he was 13, by Father Aiden Duggan, a priest at Christ the King Catholic Church in Sydney. Ellis's harrowing struggle as an adult to find justice and healing under Pell was investigated and assessed in a case study that is part of a large ongoing nationwide inquiry by Australia's government, its high-powered Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In January 2015, the royal commission produced Report of Case Study No. 8: Mr. John Ellis’s experience of the Towards Healing process and civil litigation.

[Royal Commission]

The royal commission found that when a devastated Ellis finally turned to litigation in 2004, after the archdiocese had botched and delayed his Towards Healing process, Pell decided to mount a "vigorous" attack on his claims, not only to defeat Ellis but “to encourage other prospective plaintiffs not to litigate claims of child sexual abuse against the Church" (Finding 18, Report of Case Study No. 8).

In June 2005, Pell allowed his lawyers to continue a legal strategy that centered on the archdiocese's dispute of the fact that Ellis had been abused -- despite previous conclusions by Pell's vicar general and church investigator during the Towards Healing process that Ellis's claims were credible (Findings 24-26, Report of Case Study No. 8).

Part of the archdiocese's "non-admission" strategy involved cross-examining Ellis in excruciating detail about his years of rape by Duggan. Church lawyers later admitted to the royal commission that this questioning was not necessary, given that the court case concerned only whether Ellis's claims were within statute. And Cardinal Pell conceded to the commission that his instructions had resulted in Ellis "being cross-examined and challenged as to whether the abuse occurred, in circumstances which were harmful and painful to him" (p. 13, Report of Case Study No. 8).

The archdiocese finally won its case in 2007, with the Court of Appeal finding that Cardinal Pell could not be sued as a representative of the archdiocese or as a corporation sole. Nor could he be held liable personally, since he was not archbishop while Duggan was abusing Ellis. The Trustees also could not be held liable, the court ruled, because they have no supervisory role over priests. Just as Pell had intended, the case created an encompassing legal shield - the so-called "Ellis Defence" -- that protected it against future lawsuits.

In a November 2007 memo, Pell's lawyers exulted that the Court of Appeals decision placed "a number of significant obstacles that will need to be addressed by any claimant seeking to resolve claims litigiously rather than through Towards Healing. Refocusing the resolution of these claims through Towards Healing has alone been a significant and favourable outcome of this litigation ..." The memo continued, "Finally, as this decision has provided significant protection to the Cardinal and the Trustees, this in turn will give rise to a significant reduction in damages exposure and therefore the risks that are presently insured against" (page 16, Report of Case Study No. 8).

About BishopAccountability.org

Founded in 2003 and based near Boston, Massachusetts, USA, BishopAccountability.org is a large online archive of documents, reports, and news articles documenting the global abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. An independent non-profit, it is not a victims' advocacy group and is not affiliated with any church, reform, or victims' organization. In 2014, its website hosted 1.5 million unique visitors.

Contact for BishopAccountability.org

Anne Barrett Doyle, Co-Director, barrett.doyle@comcast.net, 781-439-5208 cell
Terence McKiernan, President and Co-Director, mckiernan1@comcast.net, 508-479-9304