AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
JANET FIFE-YEOMANS THE DAILY TELEGRAPH DECEMBER 11, 2013
THE enormous wealth of the Catholic Church in Australia has been revealed in the royal commission with the Brisbane archdiocese alone having $30 million in cash reserves, on top of all the church properties.
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge said they were not even one of the “fat cat” diocese.
It also made a profit from its archdiocese development fund which last year was $22 million.
Despite the vast wealth, the royal commission into institutionalised responses to child sex abuse was told that since 1970, it had paid out only $2.5 million to victims of abuse by its priests and other religious brothers.
Of that, $1.7 million was covered by insurance so it had cost the church just $760,000.
Schoolteacher Joan Isaacs, who was sexually and mentally abused as part of a cult by one Brisbane priest, Father Frank Derriman, received just $30,000 in an out of court settlement agreed under the church’s Towards Health process.
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