Church pays £170m in abuse compensation, or £56,000 per claim

The Catholic Church in Australia has paid A$276 million (£170m) to 4,445 victims of child sexual abuse who made claims to Church authorities in the 35 years to 2015, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been told. While the vast majority of claims involved alleged child sexual abuse between 1950 and 1989, the earliest incidents date from the 1920s, writes Mark Brolly.

Senior Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission, Gail Furness, told the Commission’s final hearing into the Church on 16 January that $258 million (£159m) of the total was monetary compensation – an average of about $91,000 (£56,000) per claim – the rest being for treatment, legal and other costs.

Furness said that 41 per cent of all claims related to the Christian Brothers, the De La Salle Brothers, the Marist Brothers, the Patrician Brothers and the St John of God Brothers, with the Christian Brothers making 763 payments totalling $48.5 million (£30m). “The most common institution type identified in claims was schools,” she said. “They were identified in 46 per cent of all claims. Children’s orphanages or residential facilities were identified in 29 per cent of all claims.”

Francis Sullivan, CEO of the Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, said far more people were abused than had come forward. “These statistics are not the full story and, if anything, are understated rather than overstated,” he said. Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, in a letter to Sydney Catholics on 17 February, wrote: “It is important for everyone in the Archdiocese to know these payments have not come out of weekly parish collections nor from collections for particular purposes such as emergency relief or charitable works.”