AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
March 25, 2014
Damien Murphy
Church and state have been circling each other for centuries. Those rare times they become one, it is usually courtesy of a turbulent priest.
Australia’s own turbulent cardinal, George Pell, had his own difficulties separating church and state before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Monday.
The cardinal turned himself from a man of god into a man of law.
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.
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