Sold for $1: The Christian Brothers tactic denying victims justice
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I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to 7am. Survivors say it's like being stabbed in the back. Some were just days away from finally having their day in court against the Christian Brothers when their cases were suddenly put on hold. The Catholic religious order is crying poor, saying it doesn't have enough money to pay child sexual abuse victims the compensation they're owed. But it's been revealed that billions of dollars worth of assets that could have been used in the payouts were instead transferred just out of reach of survivors. Today, managing partner at Mark Lawyers, Michael Bradley, on the multi-million dollar properties sold off for just a dollar and the crushing court decision that's left victims in the cold.
It's Thursday, July 9. So, Michael, the Christian Brothers, this religious order, they recently turned up in the Supreme Court in New South Wales where they had what sounds like a fairly big win. Things went in their favour. Tell me what they were seeking.
Yeah, so the Christian Brothers approached the Supreme Court of New South Wales and asked for a moratorium on all current civil claims in process against the order. And the Supreme Court has awarded that moratorium, meaning that all those current cases that are unresolved are put on pause. And the basis for that application was that The Christian Brothers said, we're running out of money. We don't have enough money to cover all of the anticipated payouts. And we're proposing to enter into some form of scheme with our remaining creditors, including these claimants, to arrange payments that presumably will be substantially less than what might have been ordered to pay by the court.
Right. So they're saying they don't have the capacity to pay out the claims that are being made. Before we get into that, into the money side of it, can you tell me a bit more about the Christian Brothers? Who are they and what do we know about what happened in the institutions that they ran?
Yeah, Christian Brothers are an order of the Catholic Church. They were established as a sort of primarily educational order of brothers to educate boys. Quite a lot of schools in Australia, as elsewhere, have been Christian Brothers schools. Waverley College in Sydney, Trinity College in Perth, St Joseph's Nudgee College in Brisbane are some of the better known ones in Australia.
I'm here to announce that I will be recommending to the Governor-General that a Royal Commission be appointed to inquire into institutional responses to instances and allegations of child abuse in Australia.
The Royal Commission identified that a number of Orders within the Catholic Church had particularly appalling records of institutional child abuse.
Commission members heard from more than 8,000 people who told them of abuse in churches, orphanages, sports clubs and schools.
And Christian Brothers was one of the absolute worst. It was the worst in terms of raw numbers, so well over 1,000 complainants came forward to the Royal Commission and said that they had been abused as children in Christian Brothers schools from the 1950s onwards.
After every other older boy practice in 1975, before dropping me home, Father Ryan would sexually abuse me. every single time. I was 10 years old.
483 were named as perpetrators of child sexual abuse. What that meant was that of everyone who had been an ordained Christian brother from 1950 until the Royal Commission, 22% of them were named alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
Okay, and so what was the recommendation that came out of that then? What was supposed to happen once this was made public by the Royal Commission?
The Commission identified they had allowed serial predators to operate for many decades under their umbrella. and predate on children in lots of different locations over long periods of time. The Commission didn't have any power to resolve claims. What it did was set up, as part of its outcomes, a scheme, what they call the National Redress Scheme, which is still operating but is coming to its end.
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