Parishioners are paying for clerical abuse

AUSTRALIA

Elizabeth Farrelly

The Sydney Morning Herald

Those of us who felt utterly betrayed by revelations of sexual abuse in Australian churches now feel doubly so, said Elizabeth Farrelly. Religious institutions have been ordered by the government to pay compensation to the victims of abusive clerics, up to $112,000 per abused person, and they have opted to fund those settlements by selling off the “most sacred of assets, their churches.” Australia’s Catholic Church had the biggest child sex abuse scandal, involving thousands of victims over the decades and an outrageous cover-up—but there’s enough wealth stored up in the Vatican to compensate everyone without selling property. The Anglicans, Methodists, and other Protestant denominations, though, have hundreds to compensate, and they have chosen to deconsecrate local chapels and flog them to the highest bidder. I’d be all for it if they were getting rid of pompous cathedrals. But no, the properties marked for sale are pretty little 19th-century churches “strewn across the country, gentle reminders all of our forebears’ lean courage.” It amounts to “a broad-scale cultural destruction.” And for churchgoers, it is “a second betrayal.” The rotten clerics “destroy our trust, then, pursuing redemption, wreck our sacred spaces too.”