AUSTRALIA
Sky News
Cardinal George Pell says the Catholic church didn’t deal fairly with the victim of a pedophile priest ‘from a Christian point of view’, but in a legal sense it did nothing improper.
The church’s most senior cleric in Australia has told the royal commission into child sexual abuse that while mistakes were made in defending a court case brought by former altar boy John Ellis, he was consoled by a legal ruling protecting the church’s property trustees from being sued.
‘From a Christian point of view, leaving aside the legal dominion, I don’t think we did deal fairly,’ the former Archbishop of Sydney told the commission in Sydney on Wednesday.
‘One of the few consolations, if that’s what I’ve got from this sorry mess, is that the court of appeal unanimously endorsed the view that the trustees were not responsible in this case.’
The commission has heard the archdiocese of Sydney has property and cash worth $1.2 billion.
Mr Ellis was abused by a priest from the age of 13-to-17.
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