The Church systematically failed abuse survivors in Australia, the royal commission has found.
In reports released today the commission strongly criticised the Church’s adherence to the Towards Healing protocol, the Australian bishops’ guidelines on handling abuse allegations.
In a number of cases it found that the Church did not act in accordance with these principles. In one instance it imposed an obligation of silence on a victim and in another it failed to provide assistance and spiritual direction.
It also said that the Sydney archdiocese and Cardinal George Pell deliberately fought the claims of one victim, John Ellis, to dissuade others from taking legal action.
It reports that Cardinal Pell, whom Francis appointed in February 2014 to head the new Secretariat for the Economy and sort out the Vatican's finances, admitted this at a public hearing the following month.
Mr Ellis was abused in the 1970s when he was aged between 13 and 17 by Fr Aidan Duggan, a Sydney priest who had come from Fort Augustus Abbey school in Scotland. When mediation failed under Towards Healing, Mr Ellis in 2004 sued Fr Duggan, Cardinal Pell in his capacity as Archbishop of Sydney, and the body corporate, the Trustees of the Roman Catholic Church for the Archdiocese of Sydney. Fr Duggan died later in 2004.
But the action failed, with the Court of Appeal finding that neither Cardinal Pell nor the body corporate could be liable for Fr Duggan's criminal conduct because the Church was not a legal entity and because Cardinal Pell was not Archbishop of Sydney at the time of the abuse – the so-called "Ellis Defence".
Critics have said this has created a shield to protect the Church from legal action, but Catholic officials have argued that it was simply a legal defence that you could not be liable for the wrongdoing of others unless you were directly or indirectly responsible for supervising their conduct.
In a damning report into the Church’s handling of his case, the Commissioners found that the Church “fundamentally failed” him by acting unjustly and without compassion for his pastoral needs.
It accused the Church of manoeuvring itself into a position whereby it could maintain non-admission of the abuse to protect itself.
“The archdiocese wrongly concluded that it had never accepted that Fr Duggan had abused Mr Ellis. This conclusion allowed Cardinal Pell to instruct the archdiocese’s lawyers to maintain the non-admission of Mr Ellis’s abuse.
“The archdiocese accepted the advice of its lawyers to vigorously defend Mr Ellis’ claim. One reason Cardinal Pell decided to accept this advice was to encourage other prospective plaintiffs not to litigate claims of child sexual abuse against the Church,” it said.
“The Royal Commission agrees with Cardinal Pell’s evidence that the Archdiocese, the Trustees and he as Archbishop, did not act fairly from a Christian point of view in the conduct of the litigation against Mr Ellis,” it concluded.
The Church spent more than A$1 million fighting Mr Ellis’ claim and forced him to undergo what the report called “distressing and unnecessary cross-examination”.
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