AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)
David Marr
theguardian.com, Wednesday 26 March 2014
Amazing claims are fine in the pulpit. You expect to hear them any time in a cathedral. But not at a royal commission.
George Pell was being asked to explain how his absolute conviction that John Ellis was abused as a boy by Father Aidan Duggan – a belief based on a five-month investigation by a church assessor – squared with the instructions he gave to contest the abuse in the New South Wales supreme court.
His claim: to dispute is not to deny. “I made it quite clear to the lawyers that we could not deny that an offence had taken place,” he explained. All they did in court was dispute Ellis’s claims, “put the plaintiff to proof”.
So Ellis was cross-examined for four days about the most private details of his life: the abuse, his marriage breakdown and his humiliating sacking by the law firm Baker & McKenzie.
Would it feel any different to Ellis whether his abuse was denied or disputed, wondered the commissioner, Justice Peter McClellan. “We were dealing with Mr Ellis as a senior and brilliant lawyer,” replied the cardinal. “I think he, as a lawyer, would have understood the distinction.”
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