Clergy Abuse Survivors Respond
Title: Clergy abuse survivors hit out at moves to ban protests outside Australian places of worship
Survivors of clergy abuse have expressed deep concern at proposals to ban protests outside places of worship, with lawyer John Ellis saying a blanket ban would have seen him arrested outside a Sydney cathedral last year. Anthony Albanese on Wednesday backed proposals in New South Wales and Victoria to ban such protests after an arson attack on the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne and antisemitic vandalism in Sydney.
Speaking about the proposals, the prime minister said he “cannot conceive of any reason, apart from creating division in our community, of why someone would want to hold a demonstration outside a place of worship”.
This rankled abuse survivors, particularly those who engaged in what they describe as a respectful demonstration outside St Mary’s cathedral in Sydney after George Pell’s death, and others who have tied ribbons on the fence outside St Patrick’s cathedral in Ballarat for years.
Ellis was among those outside St Mary’s last year.
“Had such a ban, as is now suggested, been in place a few years ago, I would have been arrested for being outside St Mary’s cathedral with other abuse survivors during George Pell’s funeral,” he said.
Ellis was abused as an altar boy for years by a paedophile priest in the 1970s. When he sued the church and Pell himself, the Sydney archdiocese, under Pell’s leadership, took an aggressive approach in fighting his case despite internally accepting that Ellis had been abused and knowing of other complaints about the same priest.