AUSTRALIA
The Australian
Stuart Rintoul
From:The Australian
May 01, 2013
CATHOLIC Church insurers have paid out $30 million to 600 victims of abuse since 1990 and have revealed the existence of an “exclusion list” of priests they would not indemnify the church against because they were known by the church to be offenders.
Catholic Church Insurance chief executive Peter Rush said the insurer refused to indemnify the church against claims involving pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale for offences committed after 1975 after it “ascertained” that was when Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns learned of his “propensity to offend”.
He said the same “prior knowledge” test was applied to pedophile priest Michael Glennon and revealed that CCI did not cover the church in a $450,000 out-of-court settlement in 2006 with Emma Foster, who was raped when she was in primary school, along with her sister Katie, by pedophile priest Kevin O’Donnell and who took her own life in 2008.
The settlement paid to Foster, the amount of which was revealed at the inquiry for the first time, was nine times the $50,000 cap paid to victims under the church’s Melbourne Response process at the time, which is now capped at $75,000.
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