Catholic Church Has Paid $43 Million to Victims through Towards Healing

News.com.au
December 9, 2013

http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/catholic-church-has-paid-43-million-to-victims-through-towards-healing/story-fnii5s3x-1226778589170

THE Catholic Church has paid out $43 million through its Towards Healing process to victims who were sexually abused as children, it has been revealed.

The Christian Brothers were the most notorious religious order with the most complaints against them, followed by the Marist Brothers and then the De La Salle Brothers.

The highest amount paid out under the process was $850,000 which was to someone who was abused by a diocesan priest in the Archdiocese of Sydney, the royal commission into the institutionalised responses to child sex abuse has been told today.

It is the first time details of the controversial Towards Healing had been revealed.

The Catholic Church's barrister was heckled by the public inside the royal commission's hearing room as he quoted from the Gospel of Mark: "Let the little children come to me."

Counsel Peter Gray SC said the current hearing before the commission into the church's controversial Towards Healing process was a "searing and decisive moment in the history of the Catholic Church in Australia."

He said the church was ashamed to acknowledge that in some cases, the church concealed or covered up the facts and the abuse against children and moved the perpetrators to other places and did not report the cases to police.

"The sacred place of children, their innocence and their trustfulness, is central to the Christian tradition and to the Catholic faith," Mr Gray said.

However when he began to quote from the Gospel of Mark, there was an outcry from the public gallery.

"Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such of these hat the kingdom of God belongs," he said.

"And again from Mark, driving home the point 'Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me stumble, it would better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck, and he were cast into the sea'."

Mr Gray said that the church came before the commission "acutely aware of its failures in this fundamental part of its mission."

Counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness SC, said that as the commission puts the church's Towards Healing process under the spotlight, it had served a summons on the church to obtain data which had never before been published about how the process worked.

While there was no guarantee of the accuracy or completeness of the data provided, it showed that 2,215 people had complained through the process between January 1, 1996 and September 30 this year.

Of those, 1700 agreed to go ahead through the process although not all were substantiated or processed.

Three-quarters related to child sexual abuse from the 1950s to the 1980s and over 60 per cent happened in schools, colleges and orphanages.

Religious brothers were involved in 43 per cent of cases, diocesan priests in 21 per cent and religious priests in 14 per cent.

However these figures do not tell the whole story. They do not include the cases that went to the police or were pursued through the civil courts however it is known that not one case against the Catholic Church has reached a hearing in the courts although some have been settled out of court.

The Catholic Church's own insurance company will also be investigated. Four victims who went through Towards Healing in Brisbane, Lismore and in the Marist Brothers are preparing to tell their stories to a packed royal commission hearing room in Sydney over the next two weeks.

Ms Furness has outlined the purpose of the Towards Healing process, set up in 1997, which have been to allow the victim to talk to someone in the church, to get an apology, to get pastoral care and receive some compensation.

However if they do not want pastoral care but only compensation, then the process is halted and the victim is left to try and sue in the civil courts.

And if the victim goes to the police, the process is suspended until the investigation is complete however Ms Furness said that because the abuse is historic, the priests or brothers or others in the religious orders were dead and there is nothing the police can do.

Church hierarchy including the Archbishop of Brisbane, the Rev Mark Coleridge, the Bishop of Lismore, Rev Geoffrey Jarrett, former provincials of the Marist Brothers and the former Marist Brothers director for professional standards, Brother Alexis Turton, and Catholic Church Insurance managers will all go into the witness box.