Ballarat's Bishop Paul Bird has moved quickly to assure survivors of abuse and the rest of the community that he intends to set aside any proceeds received from the estate of his disgraced predecessor, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, to help victims of abuse.
Bishop Bird made the commitment on 6 September, the day Melbourne's biggest-selling daily newspaper, the Herald Sun, published a front-page story headed "Bishop's almighty insult", reporting that Bishop Mulkearns, who died in April, had left nearly all his estate - including a property on Victoria's Great Ocean Road worth $2.1 million (£1.2 million) and about $40,000 in cash - to the diocese he led from 1971-97. It was during this time, the paper reported, that "hundreds of children were molested by a nest of paedophile clerics".
“Whatever the diocese of Ballarat receives from Bishop Mulkearns’ estate I intend to set aside for assistance to victims of abuse," Bishop Bird said in a brief statement. "This will continue the support that the diocese has given to abuse victims over many years.”
Survivors and their supporters, as well as the head of the Church council liaising with Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, welcomed Bishop Bird's commitment. Clergy abuse survivor Andrew Collins told Ballarat's Courier newspaper that the funds inherited by the Church should be invested to ensure a continuous fund was available to help survivors. “The Diocese of Ballarat has been very supportive – reimbursing some medical and counselling costs to survivors,” Mr Collins said.
“I’m pleased to see that Bishop Bird isn’t just talking. He is actually taking some action.”
Another survivor, Peter Blenkiron, said he hoped it would be the start of a $20 million fund and said the abuse had affected the whole community. "This can start helping people who are really in crisis mode,” Blenkiron said.
“This might encourage other bishops to change their wills to help people in need.”
The CEO of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, Mr Francis Sullivan, wrote in his regular blog on 7 September: "This is a welcome announcement and will, hopefully, mean that abuse survivors in Ballarat will have greater access to pastoral and other services offered by the Diocese and also receive continuing compensation."
But a national support group for abuse victims, Care Leavers Australia Network (CLAN), called for the proceeds from Bishop Mulkearns' estate to be shared nationally, as many of the victims in Ballarat no longer lived in or near the Victorian Goldfields city, west of Melbourne.
CLAN chief executive Leonie Sheedy told Australian Associated Press that the proceeds should go into a fund that distributed money independently of the Catholic Church.
Sheedy welcomed Bishop Bird's announcement but said it was rare. Many paedophile priests had died without their assets going to help victims.
"How many other paedophiles have died and their assets have gone to the parish church?" she said.
"I think this is an issue that needs more exposure."
The Herald Sun report said that in his 2012 will, Mulkearns had left the coastal property at Fairhaven, which is in his old diocese, and the money to his successor "for the benefit of the Catholic diocese of Ballarat at his absolute discretion". The paper said the late bishop directed that the property, believed to have been left to him by his father, be sold and that his nephews have first option to buy it. Pictures, paintings and furniture were to go to the Church, while books and anything not wanted by the diocese were to be left to his only brother Geoffrey.
It said his ecclesiastical vestments had been left to his former secretary Fr Adrian McInerney, now parish priest of St Alipius' in Ballarat East -- where some of Ballarat's worst paedophile clerics once were based.
Bishop Mulkearns died on 4 April, aged 85, a few weeks after giving evidence to a public hearing the Royal Commission by video link from his nursing home in Ballarat, Nazareth House.
During his time as leader of the Ballarat diocese, which covers much of western Victoria, many paedophile priests were moved between parishes while they were abusing children.
“I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t do things differently in that time but I didn’t really know what to do or how to do it,” he told the hearing in February.
Unlike his predecessors, he was not buried in the crypt of St Patrick's Cathedral but at Ballarat General Cemetery. His funeral was held in the chapel at Nazareth House and plans for a memorial Mass in the Cathedral in May were abandoned after a threatened protest by survivors and their supporters.
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