Catholic order says it's broke—after quietly moving valuable properties elsewhere

As victims sought justice, the Christian Brothers in Australia allegedly shifted valuable real estate to a separate organization

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A Catholic order in Australia that was on the hook for paying hundreds of millions of dollars to victims of sexual abuse has spent several years offloading its property to another organization so that it can’t be sold off. It’s corruption on top of corruption, and all of it’s coming to light because of reporting by Guardian Australia.

Creepy priest (image via Adobe Spark)

You may recall that, in 2013, the nation’s government launched a Royal Commission into “Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.” The commission found serious problems with the Anglican church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, but the Catholic Church received the bulk of the attention for good reason: The investigations found that 7% of Catholic priests in the country had been accused of sexually abusing children between the years of 1950 and 2010.

It was even higher for specific Catholic orders. Among the Hospitaller Order of the Brothers of Saint John of God, an astonishing 40% of the members had sexual abuse allegations lodged against them.

The Christian Brothers, a separate order with around 680 current members, was next on the list. 22% of their members between 1950 and 2010 were alleged predators. The commission found that the order “completely failed… to protect the most vulnerable children in their care," often by moving accused members to different schools and orphanages, and that some senior leaders in the group deliberately lied to police when it came to their knowledge of the abuse happening within their ranks.

Between 1980 and 2015, 1,015 people made child abuse claims against the Christian Brothers, the highest number of claims against any Catholic order. The claims identified 483 different alleged perpetrators across 100 Christian Brothers schools.

Just as in the United States, as these predators were exposed, survivors began filing lawsuits against the individuals (if they were alive) and the organizations in general, trying to get justice for things that happened to them long ago. In many cases, the lawsuits were successful. Over three dozen dioceses in the U.S. have filed for bankruptcy as a way to prevent further lawsuits while limiting payouts to survivors. (Even then, the payouts can run in the billions of dollars.)

One of the arguments that lawyers for the Catholic Church make, however, is that they simply don’t have enough money to pay the survivors what they’re demanding. But they have buildings! So the negotiations sometimes involve figuring out which buildings—which assets of the dioceses—can be sold off to raise more money for the Church leaders’ crimes.

That’s what the Christian Brothers just did, according to Guardian Australia.

… the order is telling a court it is broke.

This week, the Christian Brothers applied for a court-ordered moratorium on all remaining civil cases lodged against it by survivors. If granted, it would permanently halt at least 200 civil claims.

The order says it wants to instead sell its remaining property portfolio – 36 properties, worth about $216m – and divvy up the leftovers between a range of creditors, including survivors, using a scheme run by retired judges. It has already confirmed the sell-off will not provide enough cash for it to pay creditors all of what they are owed.

To put that another way, the order is saying that they’re willing to sell off all of their property and add that money to the pot used to pay off victims… but that’s it. They won’t have any more money after that, even if it’s far less than what they ought to be paying.

But it turns out they’re lying.

Reporter Christopher Knaus writes that, over the past decade, since the Royal Commission began looking into the issue, the Christian Brothers have been quietly transferring many of their buildings—26 of them, at least—to a group called Edmund Rice Education Australia. Edmund Rice was the founder of the Christian Brothers, though the EREA is a legally separate entity from the order.

As the Christian Brothers have slowly started to close up shop, making them the first religious entity in Australia to “put themselves out of existence” as a result of the sexual abuse scandals, they’ve been moving all their stuff to the EREA. They insist that’s just a regular part of operational handover.

But those buildings are worth at least $50 million. (Another estimate of the property transferred to the EREA between 2013 and 2017 is over $2 billion.)

That’s why it’s revealing that the properties were sold off for $1 each—if that—with most of them being sold in 2018, long after the Royal Commission was underway.

The whole scheme suggests these weren’t normal real estate transactions but rather a way to get those properties off the books so that they couldn’t be used in future sexual abuse compensation negotiations against the Christian Brothers. The EREA, according to a financial statement covering 2024, held $2.95 billion in assets with roughly $346 million in cash.

Knaus puts it bluntly:

The $1 transfers have now left the Christian Brothers without control of a significant pool of assets they could use to pay out survivors.

To make the strategy even more obvious, Edmund Rice Education Australia said it would not be selling off the properties to assist survivors because they’re not directly linked to the Christian Brothers and are therefore “not responsible for the financial affairs or liabilities of the Christian Brothers.” How convenient.

As a lawyer for one of the survivors put it, “This is just rubbing salt into the wounds of victims of child abuse.”

It’s unclear if and how this will affect legal cases against the order. There was a hearing scheduled for last week in the New South Wales Supreme Court, but after this revelation, lawyers for the survivors were given an extension to consider how this would affect them.

If it turns out these allegations are true, however, it would be even further evidence of how the Catholic Church’s entities don’t actually care about accountability and repentance. The organizations are as interested in protecting their wealth as they once were in protecting abusive priests. They could just wave a white flag and admit they failed as a religious organization and don’t deserve any of the schools or buildings they still have—better to sell them off and give the proceeds to victims—but that thought never crossed their minds.

That’s why these transfers don’t sound like investments in ministry at all. They seem designed to make sure survivors can never receive the full compensation courts might otherwise award them.

What message does that send to survivors, who spent years overcoming trauma, shame, and fear just to tell their stories? That the Catholic order didn’t care when they were victimized the first time, and they still don’t give a damn if they’re victimized again now.

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