(AUSTRALIA)
Australian Financial Review [Sydney, NSW, Australia]
June 23, 2026
By Kylar Loussikian
One of the country’s most senior Catholic Church officials says he hopes the Christian Brothers can find a way of paying compensation to thousands of victims of clerical abuse after the 183-year-old order warned it was running out of money and would have to shut down within months.
In a pointed message, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe noted that the abuse occurred in institutions “now operated by Edmund Rice Education Australia”, an organisation that was split out of the Christian Brothers two decades ago to oversee a string of prominent schools.
“It is the great hope of the Conference that the Christian Brothers find a way to support the provision of care for victims of abuse that occurred in institutions conducted by the Christian Brothers,” Costelloe, the president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, said on Tuesday.
Whether Edmund Rice Education Australia will be dragged into the collapse of the Christian Brothers is looming as a significant question after the order said it would sell remaining assets – including a property portfolio worth around $216 million – but could not pay out victims what they owed.
Edmund Rice Education was created in 2007 and now operates dozens of schools affiliated with the Christian Brothers including Waverley College and St Pius X in Sydney, St Joseph’s Nudgee College in Brisbane, Parade College in Melbourne, Rostrevor in Adelaide and Trinity College in Perth.
The split created a new organisation with the bulk of the Christian Brothers’ assets. Edmund Rice Education had more than $345 million in cash in its account at the end of December 2024, according to its latest regulatory filings, and assets including property approaching $3 billion.
A spokesman for Edmund Rice Education said the Christian Brothers played “no role in the governance, ownership, management responsibilities or operation of any of our schools” and had not done so for decades.
“But as founders of our Charism in Australia, we sincerely hope the Christian Brothers find a path through their challenges to allow them to continue their commitment to supporting members of the community, including survivors and victims of historic sexual abuse,” he said.
Andrew Grech, a partner at Gordon Legal, a firm which has represented multiple victims of abuse at Christian Brothers institutions, said the order “should not be allowed to shelter assets in subsidiaries or related entities”.
“Most of those assets have been built with the benefit of years of preferential tax treatment and other state support, the same state whose citizens were abused in these institutions,” he said. “The … school asset quarantine is the clearest example of this structure in action. The schools were built on the backs of the brothers’ work and in many cases on land the order held.”
In a notice late on Monday evening, the Christian Brothers said the congregation was “a stand-alone organisation … financially and canonically distinct” from the Catholic Church, which meant it had “no ability to compel other Catholic institutions to assist in our current situation”.
In the statement, the order said it had made payments – for compensation and legal costs – of more than $480 million between 1980 and 2025. The order had found itself in a “difficult financial position” after the “number of claims and quantum of settlements [had] accelerated”.
In 2016, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard that more than 850 people had made a claim or complaint of sexual abuse against one or more Christian Brothers. One brother, who was identified as Brother CCK, had 46 complaints made against him between 1963 and 1987. The average age of his victims was 11 years.
The order is not the first Catholic institution to wind down citing the volume of compensation claims and its inability to pay victims of clerical abuse.
Catholic Church Insurance, which was owned by the church and insured Catholic institutions, went into run-off more than two years ago after its shareholders declined to provide additional financial assistance.