Abuse inquiry scrutinised Towards Healing

By Annette Blackwell
7 News
June 30, 2014

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/24348780/abuse-inquiry-scrutinised-towards-healing/

The pastoral got shoved aside as financial payouts became the focus of the Catholic Church's system of dealing with abuse victims, the fourth royal commission public hearing discovered.

Towards Healing - a protocol put in place by Catholic bishops in 1997 to help people who were sexually abused by clergy - was the focus of this hearing.

The process was shown to be inconsistent and at times poorly run. The church agreed that once insurers took over, the pastoral got lost.

Two women abused by priests and two men sexually assaulted by Marist brothers told of their journey through Towards Healing.

Payouts varied widely depending on the diocese and who was running the process.

Joan Isaacs was 14 when priest Francis Derriman, chaplain of the Sacred Heart Convent at Sandgate, Brisbane, began sexually molesting her. She asked for help and an apology.

Her long ordeal ended with a $30,000 payout and she had to sign a deed of release stopping her talking about her abuse or the settlement.

Jennifer Ingham's complaint against a priest in Lismore, NSW, was settled for $265,000.

The two men gave evidence that the Marist Order breached protocols and procedures recommended by the church and one said he was re-traumatised by Towards Healing.

Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge said the church had bungled its responses to abuse victims because it panicked when there was a tsunami of allegations in the early 1990s.

He and other church witnesses proposed compensation be handled separately, with the church focusing on pastoral care.

WITNESSES

At public hearing four, Jennifer Ingham wanted to know why not one Catholic Church person ever stepped out against the wrongs.

Ingham, 51, was abused by Father Paul Brown, a parish priest in Lismore, NSW, from when she was 16 in 1978 until 1982. She wanted Lismore Bishop Geoffrey Jarrett to attend her Towards Healing facilitation. He could not but met her later.

"Why in the Diocese of Lismore, then across all of Australia, then the world, why not one good, fearless person could have stepped out against the depravities and wrongs that existed," she said she wanted to ask.

He was a witness at this hearing and said he had forgotten about a Vatican memo requiring abuse cases to be reported to Rome.

Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge told the hearing there was spectacular bungling when a tsunami of child sexual abuse allegations hit the church and Towards Healing was created in a hurry.