“Paedophile priests advised never to admit guilt to limit payouts, Catholic church insurer says” & other related articles

Catholic Church Insurance has paid out about $30 million to 600 Victorian victims of child abuse since 1990.

Chief executive Peter Rush told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse that the company used to tell clients not to admit anything to victims and that minimising payouts was its primary motivation.

“In the early 1990s I am confident that that would have been the way that we would have advised our clients, quite wrongly,” Mr Rush said.

“That was the way insurers then, and some even now, run liability-type portfolios.”

Mr Rush said 5 per cent of the insurance claims had been denied, including those where the church had knowledge of an offender.

Some of those cases included offences by notorious paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale dating back top 1975 when then Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns became aware of his offences.

“In the course of our investigations we ascertained that the Bishop in the diocese of Ballarat was aware of the propensity of Ridsdale to offend,” Mr Rush said.

Deputy chairman of the inquiry, MP Frank McGuire, said the inquiry had heard allegations of heinous crimes and cover-ups.

Independent commissioners for the Melbourne Response, Peter O’Callaghan, QC, and Jeff Gleeson, SC, rejected a Victoria Police inquiry submission that said the Melbourne Response appeared to be a substitute for criminal justice and not a single complaint had been referred to police.

Mr Gleeson said both men were appalled at the suggestion they had been involved in a cover-up.

The inquiry will resume in Melbourne on Friday

Catholic Church Insurance chief executive Peter Rush said the insurer refused to indemnify the church against claims involving pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale for offences committed after 1975 after it “ascertained” that was when Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns learned of his “propensity to offend”.

He said the same “prior knowledge” test was applied to pedophile priest Michael Glennon and revealed that CCI did not cover the church in a $450,000 out-of-court settlement in 2006 with Emma Foster, who was raped when she was in primary school, along with her sister Katie, by pedophile priest Kevin O’Donnell and who took her own life in 2008.

The settlement paid to Foster, the amount of which was revealed at the inquiry for the first time, was nine times the $50,000 cap paid to victims under the church’s Melbourne Response process at the time, which is now capped at $75,000.

Outside the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations, Foster’s parents Anthony and Chrissie Foster demanded the “exclusion list” of known pedophile priests be produced to reveal the names of the priests and when their offences were known by the church.

Mr Foster also criticised the church’s Melbourne Response, which was established in 1996 to deal with abuse cases, saying it was “set up to protect the Catholic Church” and to minimise compensation paid to victims, which was “nowhere near enough”.

Melbourne Response commissioner Peter O’Callaghan QC told the inquiry Melbourne Response had dealt with 330 cases of abuse, 304 of which had been upheld. Of those, 234 were male and 70 female.

In almost three hours of evidence, he claimed he had acted in a way “akin to a royal commissioner”. He said he had found in favour of 97 per cent of complaints and denied Victoria Police assertions he had discouraged victims from taking their complaints to police. He also stated his “abhorrence” of child sexual abuse.

Appearing with fellow commissioner Jeff Gleeson SC, who described Mr O’Callaghan as “one of the most decent men I have ever met”, he said Melbourne Response was set up to provide a remedy to victims who might otherwise have none.

In his evidence yesterday, Mr Rush agreed that in the early 1990s the church’s insurers and lawyers would have “quite wrongly” advised the church to “admit nothing” in order to limit its financial liability.