AUSTRALIA
Sky News
An inquiry has heard Cardinal George Pell was worried by sexual abuse case payouts that had bankrupted some US churches and wanted to prevent similar payouts in Australia.
The former archbishop of Sydney has told the royal commission into child sexual abuse he’d been concerned by US court decisions that had sent some dioceses broke.
But he denied he wanted sexual abuse victims to go through the Catholic church’s internal system, Towards Healing, rather than the courts, so the church could control the size of payouts.
The commission was shown a 2007 letter to the archdiocese from its lawyers that described a court ruling that the church’s trustees could not be sued as a significant and favourable outcome.
The lawyers said the court’s ruling “places a significant number of obstacles” that would have to be overcome by claimants pursuing abuse cases through the courts rather than through Towards Healing.
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