TOWARDS HEALING?
Broadly speaking, my aim in introducing the Melbourne Response was to make it easier for victims to achieve justice, and to seek financial compensation and counselling, without needing to establish legal liability. I believe that it was the first scheme of its kind implemented anywhere in the world to respond to victims of child sexual abuse. I was, and remain, proud of its establishment and the assistance it has provided to victims since 1996.
Statement of Cardinal George Pell, August 2014
The percolating child abuse crisis was to be much harder to fix than dumping the staff of a seminary or cleaning out one’s ideological or theological adversaries from Church bodies. The media was going after the issue in a big way. The victims were becoming emboldened. It was becoming a dominant narrative: terrible PR for a Church whose mass attendance numbers were already in freefall. It was potentially costly in terms of compensation payouts. And in 1996, it was unclear just how many priests Pell as archbishop might lose to criminal prosecutions, but suffice to say they were falling over like dominoes. Little before him had quietly folded the issue into a neat little box and stuffed it at the very bottom of a decidedly deep, too-hard basket.
Jeff Kennett, the then-Victorian premier, was on the warpath. Kennett had in some ways a similarly can-do, crash-or-crash-through, Steerforthian personal style to Pell. There are also parallels between how their legacy is viewed. Kennett may have closed a lot of schools and been antagonistic to opponents, but by god, they say, he got things done: Kennett got an ossified and financially crippled state moving again. Similarly, with Pell, he may divide opinion, many say, but at least he’s got muscular, traditional ideals, at least he’s a man of action, at least he’s out there fighting for the one true apostolic Church, none of this wishy-washy bunkum. Kennett told Pell at a meeting that something must be done about the abuse issue. The former premier was asked about it in The Australian in 2015. The newspaper said Kennett ‘liked Pell’ and quoted him as saying, ‘I don’t think that George has ever run away from it’.
‘I was not one of the [Catholic] flock and I said to him, if he doesn’t fix it, I will. I said that not as a threat [but] as an encouragement.’
But when I called Kennett in late 2016 to take me through what happened, Kennett, who has in the past been happy to cooperate with me on other controversial stories and to say things that upset powerful people, blanched. I told him I was just interested in getting the history right, did he mind if I asked why he was refusing to comment? ‘Oh quite frankly, Louise, because I can’t be bothered,’ Kennett said. ‘Anyway, good luck with your project, I’m quite busy, have a good day, bye!’ This was after I had published a series of allegations on the 7.30 program about Pell.
Whatever Kennett’s motives were, the ‘I can’t be bothered’ refrain is a common one from people who have refused to speak to me, or, at least, have refused to speak to me on the record, for this book. Many say it’s too hard to step into the fray with either Pell or his bullish band of defenders; it is an exhausting business, sometimes accompanied by legal letters, inevitably followed by outraged columns or poisonous tweets from his supporters. ‘You never hear the end of it,’ one priest complained. ‘I’ve been down that path before,’ another former seminarian demurred. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m completely Georged out,’ said a third.
Of course, Kennett wasn’t the only person in Australia who had worked out that there was a veritable tsunami of child abuse claims coming at the nation’s Catholic Church. The Church hierarchy, too, had realised it had to act. The Victorian Governor at the time, former judge Richard McGarvie, also had a word to Pell. He told him in 1996, ‘You are going to have to deal with this problem resolutely. If you don’t, it will bleed you dry for years—emotionally, and more importantly than that, it will bleed away the good standing of the Church.’ McGarvie suggested something akin to a ‘Catholic Royal Commission’. In fact, more than two decades later, a world-first report by an actual Royal Commission—into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse—found that 7 per cent of Australian priests working between 1950 and 2010 had sexual abuse complaints made against them to the Church. That’s far higher than the international figure of 2 per cent as the quantum of paedophile priests offered by Pope Francis to Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper in 2014. For Christian Brothers, the figure was a whopping 20 per cent. St John of God, 40 per cent. Of the complaints at that time, ground zero was the Archdiocese of Melbourne which Pell oversaw. Between 1950 and 2010, 8.1 per cent of 859 priests were accused of sexual abuse. While there were other dioceses where the percentage was higher, they were in places where the numbers of priests were far lower. Melbourne had more paedophile priests than any other place in the country. And most of them operated during Pell’s time in Victoria as priest or bishop.
Pell is proud of his record in being the first Australian bishop to respond to the child abuse crisis. He consistently cites it when he is being scrutinised in the media and points out that he was probably the first in the world, let alone here in Australia, to boldly go where no other bishop had dared to tread. In 2016, he said: ‘When I became Archbishop, I turned the situation right around so that the Melbourne Response procedures were light years ahead of all this obfuscation and prevarication and deception.’
You have to wonder, then, what this religious leader who was so zealously committed to rooting out child abuse was doing in March 1996—just four months before his appointment as archbishop—at the funeral of one Nazareno Fasciale. Fasciale was parish priest at Yarraville in Melbourne’s inner west. In the preceding December, Fasciale had been charged by Newport detectives with multiple counts of indecent assault and gross indecency against four victims who had been assisted by the newly formed victims’ advocacy group Broken Rites. The priest had been remanded to appear in court the following February. As the new year arrived, the Newport detectives discovered that there was another file on Fasciale with three further victims in the nearby town of Geelong, and police had planned to apply to the Office of Public Prosecutions to combine the cases. When the matter came to court in February, a Church solicitor applied for an extension of time, alleging poor health on the part of Fasciale. The date was set for six weeks later. Fasciale was dead within a month.
Fasciale’s skirmishes in the criminal justice system right before his death did not deter his priestly colleagues from giving him a glorious requiem mass send-off at St Mary’s in West Melbourne. The archdiocese published a death notice, ending with the words ‘caring for those who cared’. Four bishops, along with an extraordinary sixty priests, attended the funeral. The Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne Peter Connors led the ceremony, referring only obliquely to Fasciale’s crimes. ‘The life of our brother Nazareno Fasciale was not without its own fair measure of pain and suffering,’ Connors conceded. ‘He would be the first to confess that he too was a sinner. So often a priest has to struggle alone.’ The mass booklet was adorned with a photograph of Fasciale, head thrown back in an infectious smile. It was written in Italian as well as English: ‘Nelle tue mani, Padre clementissimo, consegnamo l’anima del nostro fratello, Nazareno …’: ‘Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our brother Nazareno … in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, he will rise with him on the last day … Open the gates of paradise to your servant and help us who remain to comfort one another with assurances of faith, until we all meet in Christ and are with you and with our brother forever.’ As the Almighty opened the gates of paradise for Brother Nazareno, one of the four bishops at the funeral was Pell. The Master of Ceremonies was Pell’s best mate in the Church, Denis Hart.
As one of the senior priests of the day told me: ‘I don’t think any priest would apologise if he was to pray for the repose of the soul of a sinner—whether that sinner was a priest or otherwise.’ I countered to this priest that the same consideration was not given by many of those priests present to the little kids who were abused. Then or even now. Maybe Pell just didn’t know that Fasciale had been charged with indictable offences against little kids. Priests, he would often later chide, don’t gossip. This was not, I might say, my experience, in writing this book. They love a yarn and are wonderful storytellers. They’ll sit on the phone to you for ages. They’ll give you the blow-by-blow lowdown on who’s who. Information is currency in the priestly world.
Two years before the funeral, in 1993, when Fasciale resigned for euphemistically titled ‘ill health and stress’ after, handwritten archdiocesan notes attested, being ‘shocked and repentant’ about what he had done to children, Pell was on the Personal Advisory Board which accepted the resignation letter. Pell agreed that of the five members of the board that day, three—Archbishop Little, Monsignor Gerry Cudmore and Monsignor Hilton Deakin—were aware of child abuse complaints against Fasciale. So, was Pell? Did they tell him? ‘I can’t remember whether they did or they didn’t. It is possible that they did,’ Pell much later said.
The funeral of Fasciale occurred about three years after the fateful day when Pell accompanied serial paedophile Gerald Ridsdale to court in Warrnambool. The photograph will haunt Pell to his grave—it is used by the media every time there is a discussion of him and child abuse. On a kind interpretation, Pell was just doing what real Catholics do, walking with a sinner at his darkest hour. Having grown up Catholic, I can absolutely see that could have been the case. But from the Ridsdale victims’ point of view, this ‘priestly act of solidarity’, as Pell much later called it, is nothing more than a slap in the face to them and their enormous suffering. Moreover, they say, the magnanimity that Pell extended to Ridsdale has not been extended to victims. The Fasciale business suggests that perhaps Warrnambool didn’t represent a one-off, well-meaning, priestly brain snap, that it represented an attitude.
Whatever he thought in March 1996, by Pell’s account in July, his resolve had hardened against this dreadful paedophile scourge. He launched the Melbourne Response at a press conference attended by his Special Commissioner Peter O’Callaghan, QC, his spin doctors at Royce, and his lawyers, Corrs Chambers Westgarth, who drew up the scheme. For the first time, he apologised unreservedly to victims. It seemed like this was a turning point. The scheme included, apart from the Special Commissioner, a compensation panel led by Alex Chernov, QC—later a Supreme Court judge—which could award the victims up to $50 000, and an independent counselling service known as Carelink. At the end of the process with the complainant, Pell would sign a letter of apology.
Victoria Police released a statement welcoming the Melbourne Response, saying it was ‘a positive step in tackling this very sensitive community issue’. In his much later statement to the Victorian parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Institutions in 2014, Pell wrote that as archbishop, he knew he had to act immediately. ‘This was an issue that needed urgent attention and … we needed to do much better in our response,’ the Pell statement says. ‘At that stage no decision had then been taken by the Australian bishops to set up the Towards Healing procedures. This was decided at the November 1996 meeting of the Australian Bishops’ conference. The Towards Healing Protocol was published in December 1997.’
While this is all strictly true, it’s a pretty selective analysis of the facts. In 1996, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference was working on a scheme called Towards Healing and had been developing it and consulting with stakeholders for three years. The man charged with running it was the Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Geoffrey Robinson. Robinson, importantly, came from the other end of the priestly ideological spectrum to Pell. He was from the Vatican II primacy-of-conscience set.
The history of how this took place is significant, because Pell’s immediate refrain whenever he is questioned about his handling of child abuse matters, is that he was, through his Melbourne Response, the first Catholic bishop in Australia, and anywhere in the world, to come up with a comprehensive program to tackle the child abuse question.
Pell was most certainly not the first person in the Catholic Church to decide to address the issues, he just got in at the last minute, before the national response was about to be released.
In the 1980s, the Church’s euphemistically titled ‘Special Issues Committee’ was headed by, of all people, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns from Ballarat, who had covered up the offending of priests in his diocese for decades. However, the committee began to mature as the realisation dawned on the Church internationally that something must be done. Robinson said that at first psychiatrists told them they could cure paedophile priests, but that changed as the profession came to terms with the incurable nature of paedophilia. Robinson was appointed to develop a new protocol, which was to become Towards Healing. One of the questions often asked of the Church is why develop a protocol at all? This was, after all, a criminal justice issue—why not direct the complainants to the police? But Robinson says the majority of complainants he met at that time were not interested in going to the police.
So, Robinson set his mind to developing an alternative forum for victims to get some sort of restorative justice, not to mention making sure that none of the accused priests remained in service with access to children. But turning around the attitudes of his colleagues was a massive effort. ‘There was always this loyalty to the priest question that was there,’ Robinson later said. ‘[And] for a lot of the bishops the fault was a moral one and sin was a sexual sin. That was the big mortal sin. The harm that might have been caused to the minor was not treated as seriously.’ He bore the brunt of some of the bishops’ ire. ‘One bishop called me a fanatic, another an avenging angel, and yet another accused me of “acting like Adolf Hitler in the way you harangued and bullied the bishops”.’ Having said that, of the forty-one bishops present at a vote in April 1996, only five voted against the protocol.
As one of the senior people involved with the developmental stages of Towards Healing remembers, getting the protocol drawn up was a tricky business: ‘It had been going on for three years. Every time we drew up a protocol, Geoff Robinson would rightly insist on taking it to the victims’ groups and understandably, it was never good enough [for them] and we had draft after draft after draft.’ Robinson also had to get diverse dioceses and religious orders, each with their own leaders who had differing views, to come together as one. It was a massive task.
‘So instead of having this thing in 1994 as we expected, it had dragged on to November 1996. George came in as archbishop and because he thought we were taking too long, he decided he would introduce his own protocol,’ the person told me.
Auxiliary Bishop of Canberra Pat Power was involved at the time as a bishop on the conference floor who observed proceedings. Power, who is now retired, says that matters had come to a head in April 1996. There had been a conference at the University of Sydney called the International Conference on Sexual Abuse. Robinson and the senior Brigidine nun who was working with him, Sister Angela Ryan, gave an ‘excellent’ workshop at it, even though ‘the Catholic Church had come in for a lot of flack at that workshop’. ‘Someone asked Geoff Robinson, “What has the Vatican done in response to all of this?”’ And Geoff paused for a while and eventually said that there was very little. That was the grab that got in the news.’ Power says that Robinson thus came in for criticism in some quarters of the Church.
Robinson, incidentally a victim of child sexual abuse himself who was forced to confront his own painful history by speaking to so many victims, wrote about this in his 2008 book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church. He said the failure to act went to the highest levels of the Church—to the papacy. ‘I was one of many people crying out for strong and compassionate leadership on this matter and trying to do my best without the support of that leadership,’ Robinson wrote. ‘I felt that here was the perfect opportunity for the papacy to fulfil its most basic role of being the rock that holds the church together, but this did not happen and the church fractured.’ Robinson said the public comment he made at the workshop about the Church’s response attracted a letter from the Congregation for Bishops in Rome citing ‘ongoing concern’ that he had ‘expressed views that are seriously critical of the magisterial teaching and discipline of the Church’.
‘I was told that “in a recent audience, the Holy Father has been fully apprised of your public position on these issues and He has shown ‘serious preoccupation in your regard”.’ Two months later, [16 October 1996—the month before the Australian Church was to meet on Towards Healing and very soon before Pell made his announcement about the Melbourne Response] I received a further letter informing that “the relevant documentation will be forwarded, for its information and review, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”, implying that I was suspected of some sort of heresy.’ Pell was, of course, a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
But Robinson carried on, determined to get the Towards Healing protocol out to in some way address the pain of the many victims whose tragic stories he had borne witness to during those years. ‘Geoff sent out about ten things trying to achieve consensus before we were all due to meet in the November,’ Power recalls. ‘Then out of the blue, George Pell comes up with his own thing. When he claims that he was the one that gave the lead, he really just broke ranks with everyone. Certainly, the thing of him coming out early was something everyone felt very critical about.’
‘The Melbourne bombshell,’ Robinson later called it, confirming that Pell had been there for all of the discussions on Towards Healing, all of the motions, but hadn’t said a word against it. Robinson knew nothing of the Melbourne Response until Pell made it public without telling any of the other bishops. ‘He later would claim that he was the first person in Australia to have such a protocol, he was ahead of everybody, in other words. I mean, that’s only a very partial truth … Melbourne was the biggest [diocese in Australia, because Sydney is divided into parts] which meant that we no longer had that unanimity that we were all working together.’
Bishop Bill Morris, who had joined the Bishops Conference in 1993 as Bishop of Toowoomba, says the other bishops were very disappointed. ‘Well, this is George, George will go his own way because George wants to reform the Church according to George Pell,’ Morris says. ‘This is the way he will operate and he is not going to be told. He believes his approach is the best approach. No-one will tell him what to do. That’s George. It’s unfortunate.
‘It would have been much better for the Church in Australia to act as one to bring in a national approach and I am sure those who were close to George would have said that to him.’
The November 1996 meeting, which included bishops from every diocese in the country, as well as the leaders of all the religious orders such as the Jesuits and the Christian Brothers, was the day that the bishops approved the Towards Healing protocol—a united Church front to make an attempt to address this scourge. Some who were present were particularly furious at Pell’s lack of consultation with others—especially his failure, as they put it, to hear the opinions of the religious leaders who would be operating in the Melbourne Archdiocese.
One of those was Bill Uren, Provincial of the Jesuit order. When, in the weeks before the conference, Uren heard that Pell was bringing in his own scheme, he rang Pell’s archdiocesan business manager, Ted Exell. Uren and Exell went way back—they were altar boys together in the 1940s. Uren told Exell that it would be good if Pell consulted with the religious superiors of Victoria before making a final decision. Exell told his old friend he would mention it to the Archbishop. Uren also made a phone call to a mutual legal contact whose firm worked closely with Pell, a man Uren had known since boyhood too. The lawyer reportedly said he’d see what he could do too. Uren never heard back but has no doubt that the messages would have been passed on to Pell.
The big meeting was at Kensington in Sydney on 22 November 1996. On the conference floor, Uren’s blood began to boil because when Robinson would mention ‘the protocol’ (Towards Healing), Pell would interrupt and say, ‘there are two protocols’. After it happened several times, Uren saw red. He jumped to his feet and confronted Pell across the conference floor for not consulting the religious leaders of Victoria before going ahead with the Melbourne Response. Pell replied that he did consult them, but Uren said to Pell he believed the only one Pell had spoken to was Brother Paul Noonan—who was then the head of the Christian Brothers. Uren had received the information in one of those typical Catholic coincidences—his personal assistant was the wife of the Christian Brothers’ lawyer. Uren told the conference about consulting Exell, and went on to correct Pell about the ‘consultation’, saying it was simply a statement informing Noonan that it would be happening. It was said that you could have heard a pin drop. Uren really got going then, saying that the rest of them had been working on Towards Healing for three years and had been gazumped by Pell without any consultation with the religious leaders.
After the meeting, sources told me the two went toe-to-toe in the doorway, where Pell is said to have told Uren he objected to being called a liar in front of his fellow bishops. Uren was undeterred. He asked why Pell hadn’t consulted the provincials and Pell is reported to have said ‘because of the sort of provincial you are’. Bill Morris remembers the confrontation on the conference floor and the scene in the doorway. ‘You see, Bill Uren, like George, is a big man. The two of them reminded me of two big bull seals, you know? Fronting up to each other in Antarctica.’
Uren finished up as Provincial of the Jesuits the following month, in December 1996. Ironically, and much to Uren’s dismay, his successor, Daven Day, was the only religious leader (or bishop) in Australia to opt to go with Pell’s Melbourne Response, rather than Towards Healing.
Morris and many others I have spoken to in the Church believe that Towards Healing, while certainly not perfect and in many ways wanting, had a more pastoral outlook than the Melbourne Response, which was set up under the auspices of a Queen’s Counsel and had a more legalistic framework. Nonetheless, many have a great respect for O’Callaghan and said they believed he was motivated by decency.
‘What [Pell] came up with had a lot to recommend it,’ Robinson says, ‘but I had big problems with it too. The major one was that the very first point of contact for a victim was a QC in a city office, that’s who he had to go and see, and I felt that that was just too much for victims altogether. Towards Healing, on the other hand, had a person go and see the victims in their own homes.’
Pell’s argument is that the situation was so dramatic that he had to act swiftly. He later told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry, ‘in light of the urgent need for an effective system to respond to victims of abuse and the uncertainty at that stage about initiatives for a national response, I moved quickly’. To be fair to Pell, things in the Catholic Church move in a byzantine and sluggish way. He knew the job needed to be done. But many of his colleagues believe that in going about it the way he did, he undermined the national process with an inferior scheme, and that unity was vital when addressing such a vexed issue. Moreover, as the Royal Commission was later to find in its report into the Melbourne Response, because Towards Healing did not cap the financial payment to victims as the Melbourne Response had—at $50 000—‘it may have and has resulted in more generous payments to survivors than the Melbourne Response’.
Pell later said that when he was Archbishop of Melbourne ‘the Catholic authorities worked from the principle that the needs of victims must be our first consideration’. With respect to Pell, that is not in my experience how the victims felt they were being treated. Pell said that he had only a handful of ‘relatively minor complaints’ about the scheme and ‘on the contrary, over time I received many positive comments about the system’. In covering the later Royal Commission and speaking to survivors, solicitors and advocacy groups, I found that the response to the Response, from the people it was meant to help, was overwhelmingly underwhelmed. This was a position later reflected in the Victorian parliament’s Betrayal of Trust Report by the Parliamentary Inquiry in the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Institutions of November 2013.
One of the issues some survivors had, including Chrissie and Anthony Foster, was that the counselling service Carelink was run by a psychiatrist, Professor Richard Ball, who had provided treatment not just to victims, but to priests of the archdiocese, including their daughters’ abuser O’Donnell, and had also provided expert witness statements on the priests’ behalf. The Fosters believed this was ‘not fair’ and the Royal Commission later agreed that while it did not question Ball’s integrity, ‘where there is a power imbalance, perceptions matter a great deal’.
Then there is the fact that Leder from Corrs Chambers Westgarth, who is Pell’s solicitor and acts for both Pell and the archdiocese to the time of writing, was given medical and psychological reports and assessments of the victims (albeit ‘on a confidential and without prejudice basis’), and was involved with each component of the process, at the same time as he was acting on behalf of the archdiocese in the civil matter the Fosters took. The Royal Commission later found the fact that Corrs was performing these dual roles raised ‘clear potential for conflict. It also raises difficulties with confidentiality.’ The Commission questioned the independence of the Melbourne Response—something Pell was always so publicly defensive about—‘when the lawyer for the Archdiocese was a common and key element and was involved in all major steps of the process’.
A common refrain from survivors was that while they found O’Callaghan himself superficially pleasant enough, they found the framework set up by the archdiocese patronising, incomplete and insufficient; people said to me that they felt like it was set up ‘to shut me up’. They often felt intimidated by the fact that interviews were conducted in O’Callaghan’s barrister’s chambers, which presented another power imbalance when, as a victim of child sexual abuse, power imbalance is something to which you are acutely sensitive. O’Callaghan himself rejects this as an issue. In the Melbourne Response’s official documents, it cautions complainants that while they ‘remain free to use the normal court processes’ for civil compensation, such proceedings would be ‘strenuously defended’.
Leder told Chrissie and Anthony Foster’s daughter, Emma in his $50 000 compensation letter that it was provided as ‘a realistic alternative to litigation which will otherwise be strenuously defended’. He later agreed that this would ‘frighten the average person’ and ‘the language was inappropriate’. When the Fosters did eventually sue, it was strenuously defended in the sense that the Church, much to the Fosters’ confusion and dismay, at first would not even admit the abuse in their defence to the Fosters’ statement of claim. Leder was asked about this many years later, in 2014, by the Royal Commission’s Counsel Assisting Angus Stewart, SC. ‘Did you not see at the time that, whatever the technicalities about the legal structure of the Church and the breach of duty of care, the one thing that would hurt the most would be for the Church to deny that there had been abuse?’ Leder’s answer was dazzlingly legal. ‘We didn’t deny that there was abuse, sir.’ What they did, Leder said, was not admit the abuse. He said he believed that it was up to the lawyers for the Fosters to explain the difference between ‘do not admit’ and ‘deny’. The Church ultimately settled with the Fosters.
When many people think of the Fosters and Pell, the immediate thing that comes to mind is the well-told story about the couple going to see Pell, and being confronted with what Anthony Foster described (under parliamentary privilege in the Victorian Inquiry in 2013) as his ‘sociopathic lack of empathy’. The headline-hitting moment was the Fosters showing Pell a photograph of Emma, after she had slashed her wrists, with Pell saying, ‘Hmmm, she’s changed, hasn’t she?’
But what is less well known is the wrangling that went on for years, before a settlement was reached. The lengths the Church went to, through its Melbourne Response and the legal wrangling, demonstrated to the Fosters, Chrissie tells me, that ‘I was a good Catholic and yet it meant nothing. I meant nothing, my girls meant nothing.’ She says that she has not come across ‘one single survivor who has had a positive experience of the Melbourne Response’ and is scathing about the fact that, unlike Robinson with Towards Healing, victims were not consulted by Pell to set up the Melbourne Response. Foster believes it was a top-down, paternalistic approach, and ‘a pathetic scheme’. She is also concerned that the scheme operated with impunity—with no regulation from government. ‘The government allowed this to happen, there were no checks and balances, they were not accountable,’ Foster says. ‘It was a monopoly and it was basically “take that”,’ she says, referring to the ex gratia payments, ‘or “get lost”.’
Indeed, when I ask about the Melbourne Response, survivors invariably roll their eyes, or say, ‘don’t get me started on that’. One example is Julie Stewart. In a statement, Stewart said she had not expected the ‘hostile cross-examination’ to which she was subjected and was very troubled by being made to sit facing her abuser at the parish of Doveton, Father Peter Searson. She was required to sign a deed of release to waive her right to future compensation in order to be paid the $25 000 she was awarded and she also had to sign a document which she believed to be a confidentiality agreement. She left the hearing in tears. ‘I felt that the whole process re-traumatised me,’ Stewart wrote in her statement. The documents which were interpreted by survivors to be non-disclosure agreements were later abolished, but not before many felt that they had been used to silence them.
Another example is Paul Hersbach, who, along with his father, uncle and brother, was abused by the priest Victor Rubeo. I met the Hersbachs in 2014 and they are a lovely family but are deeply scarred, particularly Paul’s dad, Tony—who feels so guilty that Rubeo’s grooming of him continued to the point where the priest also preyed on his sons. O’Callaghan told Paul Hersbach that ‘due to the “unsurprising haziness” of [Paul’s] memory, there would not appear to be much point in taking his matter to the police’. Paul was awarded a $17 500 ex gratia payment by the Melbourne Response. As Paul Hersbach much later said, ‘signing it helped me emotionally at the time, but now causes me angst. The Catholic Church has taken so much from me over the years. I feel like the Church has exerted complete and utter control over my life. I find it ironic that at the point where I finally wrested control back, I signed a document giving up my rights and putting myself again under its control …
‘I want the Church to acknowledge that the deeds of release signed by victims through the Melbourne Response may add to a victim’s burden and exacerbate the very problem they were designed to alleviate.’
Hersbach is one of the lucky survivors for whom the child sexual abuse he suffered has not been something which has dominated and destroyed his life. He thinks about it every day, but he has a lovely family and he’s a senior executive at Australia Post. He says that Pell has become a lightning rod to which people attach their anger—sometimes without real justification. ‘It’s like a pantomime where they want to boo and hiss when he comes on stage,’ Hersbach muses. But that said, he believes a dispassionate analysis of the Melbourne Response is not at all favourable to Pell or those who designed it.
For instance, that compensation cap—$50 000—was a fraction of what the complainants might have expected to receive in a civil court had they been successful. Indeed, it was far less than what they would have received under Towards Healing, had Pell and his band of legal advisors (who were raking in a small fortune through their involvement in the scheme) not jumped in ahead of Robinson and the other bishops.
Between the start of the scheme, in October 1996, and March 2014, the Melbourne Archdiocese spent just over $34 million on the Melbourne Response. But the breakdown of figures is instructive. It paid $9.7 million in ex gratia compensation payments to survivors. The average amount received by a survivor was $32 000. Its Carelink scheme—to direct survivors into external counselling—cost $11.1 million (largely staff and administrative costs). But the biggest cost of all was the legal bills. The combined cost of paying for O’Callaghan (and his successor Jeff Gleeson, QC) and Corrs Chambers Westgarth was $12.5 million. And that didn’t count the other legal bills to Corrs and other silks to defend the Church in any compensation cases that were brought civilly or, for instance, to write solicitor’s letters to people the Archbishop deemed defamatory. ‘[The legal bills for the Melbourne Response] were worth it,’ Chrissie Foster says. ‘He saved the Church hundreds of millions of dollars in what he would have had to pay in the courts.’
To be fair, a civil process would have taken years for a survivor to complete. Especially since civil claims were strenuously defended by Church lawyers—the same lawyers that were helping to run the Melbourne Response. The scenario is darkly comical. A Church happy to admit abuse if you take $20 000, but will not admit it if you claim $750 000.
Rightly or wrongly, survivors told the Royal Commission that they also felt deeply suspicious of O’Callaghan’s motives when he cautioned them about difficulties he warned they might encounter if they went to the police (which, he did say, they were free to do). The Royal Commission found that O’Callaghan had discouraged some victims from going to the police and ‘this advice was not appropriate’. O’Callaghan told complainants that if the police process commenced, the Melbourne Response process would terminate. The complainants were also not appointed lawyers—if they wanted one, it was their own responsibility. And while the Church would pay for a complainant’s lawyer if the complainant asked, O’Callaghan would not offer it, and certainly nothing was offered in writing. The Church provided legal representation for the accused priests, no questions asked.
The more or less universal opinion of those I have spoken to—people whose childhoods were robbed of them—not to mention their legal representatives and other advocates, is that the Melbourne Response as it operated under Pell was nowhere near good enough. And if you are not pleasing, or even re-traumatising, the very people you supposedly set out to help in the first place, whether or not it was well intentioned becomes somewhat beside the point.
Francis Sullivan, from the Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, is the lay Catholic tasked with cleaning up after this almighty mess. As Sullivan conceded to me in an interview for the ABC 7.30 program, ‘the Church, I don’t believe, is up to looking after these matters internally’.
‘Individuals who are either left confused or without information, who are left on the long handle and not responded to, who feel frustrated by the Church’s processes, who sometimes are thwarted because they can’t get information they need, all of that is the result of the Church investigating itself,’ Sullivan says, his eyes shining.
So, when Pell says he was a trailblazer in handling the sexual abuse crisis in Australia, you have to take it with a grain of salt. As Paul Hersbach says to me of the fact that Pell jumped in ahead of the other bishops, with a scheme that limited how much victims would be paid and required deeds of release to be signed, ‘history is littered with cases of he who wins the battle controls the story’. Hersbach, for one, is not buying that story. Pell may have won that battle, but he has not won the war. And as for the idea that Pell has been a white knight who came to the rescue of victims? Hersbach is scathing. ‘I find that kind of offensive.’