Unsurprisingly victims of clerical sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland have reacted angrily to an appeal by a bishop for parishioners to help to pay spiralling compensation claims.
According to the Times Bishop Denis Brennan of the diocese of Ferns (South east Ireland) told parishioners that the diocese had so far paid €8 million (£7.5 million) to settle 48 civil actions arising from decades of sexual abuse by priests. He said another 13 actions against the diocese were pending.
Dr Brennan is the first bishop to give details on how much compensation has been paid to victims. He said that his official residence had been remortgaged to cover nearly €2 million in legal fees. A request for financial help from parishioners was not about sharing blame, he said, but about “asking for help to fulfil a God-given responsibility”.
Eugene Doyle, the chief financial officer of the diocese, said that the Church had no option but to ask its members to help to foot the bill. He estimated that the diocese’s 100,000 members in 80 parishes would be asked to collectively contribute €60,000 a year for the next 20 years. No money would be taken from normal weekly collections, he said.
What barefaced nerve of the bishop to ask parishioners to bail the church out after the church singularly failed in its duty to deal with abusive priests. As for calling the enormous costs a God-given responsibility, Bloody hell!
The Catholic chirch got itself into this mess, so its first port of call should be its own assets and not the pockets of parishioners who I bet are disgusted at the behaviour of the priests in question, as well as the leadership that brushed the abuse under the carpet.
12 comments:
That really is disgusting. Auctioning the Vatican would be a far better idea.
You won#t hear me disagree Susan!
I'm with Susan!!
That makes two us in agreement Knatolee!
He remortgaged his house. Now if he'd sold it and bought a nice little semi - okay, a bungalow - somewhere it might have been more convincing.
Unbelievable.
Heaven forfend Liz! It is truly unbelievable
Imagine how many of the world's woes could be alleviated if the Vatican was sold!
Indeed nursemyra!
I heard this on the news when I was driving to Waterford on Tuesday and for a moment wondered if I had gone mad and was hearing things! It beggars belief, especially as many of the legal bills were incurred, to the best of my knowledge, because of the Church's extremely adversarial approach to victims (pursue your case against us and we'll sue you into oblivion seemed to be the attitude). And, astoundingly, the same institution still controls 90% of all primary schools in Ireland! Sometimes living in Ireland is like some weird bad dream you'd get from consuming too much cabbage and cheap porter...
What to say but call it as we see it. A bare faced insult to the people of the diocese
Well, it only makes sense. We are paying through the nose to be shagged by our governments, so why shouldn't church follow the example?
But then the government shagging is just metqaphorical, unlike that of the priests!
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