AUSTRALIA
7 News
BY ANNETTE BLACKWELL
March 24, 2014
“I am not the sort of fellow who runs around blaming people for misunderstandings,” Cardinal George Pell said on Monday.
That was midway through his evidence to the child sexual abuse royal commission where he blamed a “muddled” John Davoren, the director of his Professional Standards Office, for giving him inconsistent advice on John Ellis.
Mr Ellis sued the cardinal and the trustees of the Sydney archdiocese for the abuse he suffered as an altar boy at the hands of a priest in the 1970s.
Cardinal Pell also dumped on the former vicar-general and chancellor of the Sydney Archdiocese, Monsignor Brian Rayner, “who continually got hold of the wrong end of the stick”.
The monsignor had been appointed by the cardinal but was fired after two years because the “job was completely beyond him”.
Cardinal Pell also said he had great respect for his private secretary Dr Michael Casey but said the good doctor was only surmising when he told the commission last week his boss would have known what money an abuse victim was being offered.
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