IRELAND
The Guardian
March 6, 2018
By Henry McDonald
Men hope to use visit by Pope Francis to ask why church has not paid out agreed compensation
Survivors of sexual and physical abuse in schools run by the Catholic church in Ireland have demanded a meeting with Pope Francis during his visit to the country in the summer to discuss compensation.
The Irish Catholic church has invited the pontiff to a religious conference in August. It will be the first papal visit to Ireland since John Paul II’s tour in 1979.
The Guardian has seen a letter from the Irish Survivors of Child Abuse (Soca), in which the campaign group calls for a meeting with Francis to ask why Catholic religious orders have not paid out more in compensation. The letter has been sent to archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, asking him to pass on their request to the Vatican.
Soca is angry about a deal between the Catholic church and the Irish government in 2002 that resulted in the taxpayer footing most of the bill for compensating those abused in religious institutions.
The deal resulted in the church having to pay out €128m of a €1.3bn compensation bill.
Last year, Ireland’s comptroller and auditor general found that only €85m had been paid out of church funds. On top of its criticism of the deal, Soca said the church should at least be forced to pay out in full the agreed €128m.
In the letter to Martin, one of the co-founders of Soca said survivors also wanted Pope Francis to hear about what they described as the “Violence R Us” culture in religious orders such as the Christian Brothers, which ran Ireland’s notorious industrial schools.
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