AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article posted 6 April 2014)
In a written statement issued on 4 April 2014, the Catholic Church archdiocese of Melbourne says it will “revisit” its system of compensating church-abuse victims in the Melbourne-Geelong area, with a view to either increasing or removing the current maximum of $75,000 per victim. At present, most Melbourne victims are lucky to receive half that amount, or less, even if the church-abuse has devastated a family’s life.
The statement, issued on behalf of Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart, promised that the archdiocese would seek input from victims “into how compensation should be awarded in the future and how past cases should be reviewed”.
Limitations
The following analysis from Broken Rites demonstrates that Archbishop Hart’s promise has some limitations:
* Australia is divided into 30 or so Catholic diocese (seven of these dioceses have the prefix “arch-“). The Melbourne archdiocese has a compensation system called the “Melbourne Response”, which operates only in the Melbourne region. Apart from Melbourne, all of Australia’s other dioceses a have a different compensation system, called “Towards Healing”.
* Geographically, the Melbourne archdiocese is confined to the Melbourne metropolitan area (plus the city of Geelong and a few small towns near Melbourne). This archdiocese does not cover the remainder of the state of Victoria. Victoria’s country areas are covered by three other dioceses – one for western Victoria (which has a cathedral at Ballarat), one for northern Victoria (with a cathedral at Bendigo) and one for eastern Victoria (with a cathedral at Sale).
* The Melbourne Response does not cover all priests in Melbourne — but only those priests who officially belong to this archdiocese. The Melbourne Response does not cover the many priests in Melbourne who belong to religious orders (such as Jesuits, Franciscans, Salesians and so on), as each of these religious orders has its own national leader (who is not a bishop). For example, priests in Melbourne from the Salesian religious order would be covered by Towards Healing, not by the Melbourne Response.
* And the Melbourne Response does not cover religious Brothers (such as the Christian Brothers, the Marist Brothers or the De La Salle Brothers), or nuns (such as the Sisters of Mercy, etc), as each of these orders has its own Australian national leader.
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