Religious Orders Assets & Liabilities and 'offer'

[andrew49]

Below is a table of the Assets & Liabilities of the Religious Orders excoriated in the Ryan Report for the systemic and systematic abuse of children in their care. Also in one column in the table is the ' further substantial contribution by way of reparation' for the abuses that the children suffered.

[andrew49]

The Religious Orders responsible for abusing Ireland's poorest children say they're struggling to come up with money to help their victims. Yet investigations into their net worth paint a very different picture - that of nuns and brothers with billions' worth of carefully sheltered assets worldwide. Irish government leaders said they expect the 18 religious orders involved in abusing children in workhouse-style schools to pay a much greater share of compensation to 14,000-15,000 State-recognised victims. Also demanded was that the secretive orders reveal the true scope of their wealth for the first time.

Defence Minister Willie O'Dea said.

"We have to ascertain how much they actually have. The government is adamant and determined that they will make an appropriate contribution,"

The orders have ruled out paying more compensation, even though the report found them principally to blame and guilty of far greater abuses than they admitted to in 2002. Instead the orders have proposed unspecified contributions to a new victims' welfare fund. Experts on the global fight against abuse claims say the orders won't shed light on their finances voluntarily. Reverend Thomas Doyle, an American Catholic priest who is an expert on canon law and a champion of abuse victims' rights said:

"First off, don't trust anything they say, and be prepared to follow up the urging for voluntary donation or contribution with some form of force."

Doyle said the Irish Detention Orders

"must be forced by a power greater than themselves, and that's the courts and the Irish government, to make sure the compensation comes, even to the point of forcibly divesting them of properties".

The order most deeply implicated in the abuse report, the Christian Brothers, was founded two centuries ago in Ireland but has spread across the globe. It has the biggest property empire and faces exposure to abuse claims ranging from the United States to Canada, Australia and Ireland.

"Their assets and how they hold assets is of Byzantine complexity,"

said David Wingfield, a Toronto-based lawyer who has won abuse settlements from Christian Brothers schools in Canada, from Newfoundland to British Columbia.

"They have unlimited financial resources to mount litigation, and they have absolutely no shame in doing so."

Brother Edmund Garvey, spokesman for the Christian Brothers in Ireland and the order's former world leader, estimated that its approximately 100 schools in Ireland alone are worth euro 400 million ($560 million). Garvey said his order would try to find more funds to compensate victims, but wasn't sure that was realistic.

"At this point in time, I don't believe we can,"

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sneakily this Order also offered to deal only with one set survivors they abused as children - in effect to dismantle the flawed indemnity deal they signed up to.

A lawyer who specialises in class-action lawsuits against Catholic authorities in the United States, said the Christian Brothers often sought

"to disassociate themselves from particularly pregnant assets that could be given over to, or awarded, in a judgment. It's what corporations do when they feel like they're in trouble. The question is whether it's lawful,"

Mary Raftery, the Irish journalist who exposed church abuse cover-ups in Ireland, said Christian Brothers' leaders in Australia and Canada behaved the same way during 1990s abuse scandals in those nations as it was doing now in Ireland.

"They denied the abuse, accused the victims of lying, and set about ensuring that their assets were protected from survivors and lawsuits by either creating trusts or splitting various schools and assets away from central control,"

Other Irish-founded orders exposed as serial abusers have a big footprint overseas, particularly the Sisters of Mercy nuns, who run scores of girls' schools in Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

The Sisters of Mercy also own key hospitals in Ireland.

Their nuns were identified in the Irish report as serial abusers of girls, chiefly in the form of beatings and humiliation rather than molestation. Like the Christian Brothers, they have vowed to cooperate with the Irish government - but made no commitments on providing more funds for victims. Some victims want the government to hold a national referendum to amend Ireland's constitution so it would permit seizures of church money and property.
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From various media sources and personal and professional knowledge of the devious nature of the Detention Orders

[Administration]

All is needed is a few politicians with the will, the brains and the desire for fairness. Just by pursuing common justice without any predjudice the natural result would be the abolition of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead we have a rotten political gang riddled with arch catholic sheep.