A Staggering $20 Million Paid to Christian Brothers’ Abuse Victims

By Janet Fife-Yeomans
Daily Telegraph
May 7, 2014

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/a-staggering-20-million-paid-to-christian-brothers-abuse-victims/story-fni0xqrc-1226908046836

THE Christian Brothers have paid more than $20 million to victims of sexual and physical abuse across Australia.

The staggering figure was revealed in the child sex abuse royal commission yesterday.

The payments made by both the order and Catholic Church Insurance were made to 531 people, usually child migrants brought to Australia from the UK and Malta, and involved 775 allegations, counsel assisting the commission Gail Furness said.

The commission has heard the brothers were forced into settling claims after a class ­action brought by law firm Slater and Gordon in 1993.

The action was defeated on technical grounds but forced the order into setting up funds and settling claims.

The Christian Brothers’ own historian identified at least 70 brothers around Australia who had complaints made against them, mainly of sexually abusing boys ­between 1919 and 1969, the child sex abuse royal commission was told yesterday.

There were 18 brothers who were repeat offenders, while one had five separate complaints and ­another four complaints.

However from 1945, the ­institution’s leadership appeared to have gone soft and not one brother was expelled from the order, the commission was told.

A former provincial leader of the order, Brother Anthony Shanahan, has revealed he did not tell the whole truth to a federal parliamentary committee about a decade ago.

He told the committee, one of a number that investigated the shocking sexual and physical abuse at Christian Brothers institutions, that: “It seems that these abuses did not come to the notice of supervising authorities, be they congregational, diocesan, federal or state.”

After being taken through the dozens of cases revealed by the historian Brother Barry Coldrey in a 1993 report, Brother Shanahan said he was “embarrassed”.

“I am embarrassed to read that because I think it isn’t ­accurate,” Brother Shanahan, the former leader of the province of Western Australia and South Australia told the commission at a sitting in Perth.

The files and reports uncovered by Brother Coldrey, when he prepared a book to mark their 100-year anniversary in Australia in 1994, revealed the abuse was thought to be a moral failing, a breaking of the vow of chastity, but not a criminal offence.

He found the “peak time” for breaking the “second vow” was in 1953, when at least six brothers had that problem.

They included child abuse and “falling in love” with adults. The first conviction of a brother for sex abuse in Australia was ­Brother Carmody in 1919.