(AUSTRALIA)
Church Times [London, England]
July 6, 2026
By Muriel Porter
[PHOTO: John Thomas Lawrence (left) and his lawyer Mark Magazanic speak to the media in 2020, after Mr Lawrence, a child migrant from the UK, was awarded more than $1.3 million in damages after suffering abuse in the care of the Christian Brothers in Western Australia in the 1950s]
THE Christian Brothers Oceania Province, which includes Australia, has won a court moratorium on all current and future civil sexual-abuse claims, while it seeks court permission to create a creditors’ scheme to pay out sexual abuse survivors.
If the scheme is not approved — the hearing is set down for September — the Order will have to go into liquidation. In either case, the Order will then cease to exist in Australia.
The decision, by the NSW Supreme Court, has thrown ongoing sexual-abuse cases into chaos, and caused dismay among sexual-abuse survivors; there are more than 240 claimants and prospective claimants.
The Order told the court that it cannot meet the claims of sexual survivors, and, if the scheme is approved, it will sell off its remaining 36 properties, worth an estimated AUD$216 million.
The proceeds will be divided among survivors and creditors, as well as providing care for the remaining 176 Brothers, whose average age is 81.
The Order has already paid out AUD$480 million in compensation and associated costs between 1980 and 2015. The Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse, which met between 2014 and 2017, recorded more than 1,000 complaints concerning the Order — more than any other Roman Catholic entity it examined.
Court documents revealed that the Order’s appeals to the Vatican and other Roman Catholic entities for financial assistance had failed. It has also emerged, however, that the Order has transferred a number of valuable properties, including leading private schools, to Edmund Rice Education Australia, an entity the Order created in 2007. Some estimates suggest that property worth more than AUD$800 million was transferred for peppercorn amounts. Edmund Rice Education has declined to offer the Order financial support.
The barrister representing the Commonwealth of Australia in the court hearing, Sera Mirzabegian SC, said that the Commonwealth was concerned “whether those transfers were appropriate”. They raised more questions than answers, as there appeared to be discrepancies in the records, she said.