AUSTRALIA
The Australian

APRIL 15, 2015

Sarah Elks
Reporter
Brisbane

The Catholic Church’s insurers scolded Rockhampton’s Sisters of Mercy for issuing a “prejudicial” unreserved apology to hundreds of children who suffered alleged sexual abuse and bashings in their orphanage decades earlier.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse yesterday heard ­evidence of shocking abuse — ­including rapes by priests, public floggings, ritual humiliation for bed-wetters, and scant education — at the nuns’ Neerkol orphanage, which housed about 4000 children between 1885 and 1978.

When abuse complaints from former residents surfaced in the 1990s, the Sisters of Mercy worked with survivors to draft and publish an apology in 1997 to those victims of “physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual abuse”. The following month, however, Catholic Church Insurance Limited wrote to one of the order’s nuns, criticising the apology.

“The reason why you have ­issued an apology…