A particularly abusive order of the Catholic Church, the Congregation of Christian Brothers, have been found to be systematically transferring their assets to an ecclesiastic shell company to avoid having to pay victims.
These assets were transferred to, "Edmund Rice Education Australia," which has taken over their schools in recent years.
Just as an FYI, Edmund Rice was the founder of Congregation of Christian Brothers.
Funny, innit?
I am not sufficiently proficient in Australian vernacular to properly describe this. Perhaps my reader(s) could help me heremAdam* pauses briefly, his voice catching slightly down the phone line. He’s contemplating how to describe the unprecedented new legal tactic the Christian Brothers Catholic order is deploying against him and hundreds of other abuse survivors.
“It’s not human,” he says. “It’s just not human.”
The Christian Brothers had an oversized role in the church’s industrial-scale abuse of children. A staggering 22% of its brothers were alleged perpetrators – the second highest rate of any Catholic order.
………
Now, 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.
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.
But a trove of church property records obtained by Guardian Australia tells another story – one that survivors have not been made aware of.
A Guardian investigation can reveal that the Christian Brothers has spent the last decade transferring large, multimillion-dollar property holdings for amounts of $1 to a separate Catholic church entity which is not part of the proposed sell-off scheme.
The beneficiary of the $1 property deals is Edmund Rice Education Australia, an independent organisation created in 2007 to assume control of schools previously associated with the Christian Brothers like Waverley College in Sydney, Trinity College in Perth and St Joseph’s Nudgee College in Brisbane.


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