AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)
Helen Davidson
theguardian.com, Monday 24 March 2014
Cardinal George Pell rebuffed the testimony of former colleagues who said he was far more aware of the details of the infamous John Ellis case than he maintains as he appeared before a child abuse inquiry in Sydney.
The cardinal, appearing at the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, also defended the legal strategy the church deployed when Ellis sued.
Pell, who will take up a senior role at the Vatican on Monday, dismissed a suggestion by senior counsel assisting the commission that his proclaimed ignorance of key details – including the amount requested by Ellis in compensation – was “inconceivable” given his deep involvement in the case.
The commission’s eighth public hearing is examining the Catholic church’s response to allegations made by the former altar boy Ellis, who was abused by his parish priest, Father Aidan Duggan, in Sydney between 1974 and 1979. Ellis sued the church in 2007 but lost when the supreme court ruled the church as an entity could not be sued.
On Monday Pell laid much of the blame for the bungling of the Ellis case at the feet of the former director of the NSW-ACT professional standards office John Davoren and the former vicar general and chancellor of the Sydney Catholic archdiocese, Monsignor Brian Rayner. On Monday morning Pell described Davoren as “a muddler” who was “sometimes illogical”.
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