AUSTRALIA
The Age
Church funds priest on the run
January 10, 2016
Chris Vedelago, Cameron Houston
The Catholic Church has spent millions of dollars providing pensions, housing, and private medical insurance to convicted paedophile priests despite branding them “evil” and having most defrocked.
The Melbourne archdiocese alone is still financially supporting six former priests who have been convicted for committing sex crimes against children.
Parishioners have unwittingly been partly funding the assistance through their donations into church collection plates, which they believed went towards the local church or fundraising for retired priests.
Church records show two of the paedophiles, priests Wilfred Baker and David Daniel, received hundreds of thousands of dollars alone in annual pensions and entitlements.
Their victims received one-off payments of $31,000 to $37,000 under the church’s Melbourne Response redress scheme.
The decision to continue financially supporting disgraced priests was made by senior church figures in Melbourne and the top advisory council at the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, according to documents tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
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