Church must bear pain of restitution

This time last year, Father Chris Rush ton, provincial superior of the Oblate order in Canada, gave his usual Sunday sermon from the pulpit at St Joseph's Roman Catholic church in Ottawa. His topic was the role of Canada's Oblates in running residential schools for native children and the abuse that had been endemic in that system.

Whether or not the parishioners were especially interested in this uncomfortable subject, they soon had reason to pay attention. Father Rushton told them the church might have to be sold because of the cost of paying compensation to the victims of abuse in the schools. All over Canada, religious institutions are going bankrupt or liquidating assets to pay damages to victims of institutional abuse.

Last year, the general synod of the Anglican church in Canada announced that its national headquarters in Toronto was facing bankruptcy. Many individual Anglican dioceses are already technically insolvent.

Some Catholic orders in Canada, including the Christian and De La Salle Brothers, are already effectively bankrupt. The Christian Brothers have liquidated their assets and lawyers are investigating whether the order has moved assets offshore. Ironically, one victim of the order's notorious Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland was Leo Rice, a descendant of the order's founder, Edmund Ignatius Rice.

The Canadian federal government has estimated total liabilities could be over $2 billion. The bulk of claims, well in excess of $1 billion, is expected to involve Catholic-run institutions which cared for roughly two-thirds of all former inmates. Anglican-related liabilities could top $450 million, while those of the United Church could be about $200 million.

All of this is deeply traumatic for the Canadian churches; one can imagine how Massgoers in Ireland would feel if they were told that the church they had attended all their lives might have to be sold. But this trauma is also, in a deep sense, just. It brings home in a profound way the scale of the wrong that has been done to children in the institutions to whose care they were entrusted.

Just as most people feel the punishment for a crime must really hurt if it is to express society's disapproval, so it is right that the institutions which inflicted and permitted the abuse should have to face real consequences.

At the moment in Ireland, a scheme to compensate the victims of institutional abuse is being hammered out and legislation is expected to come before the Dail in a few months. There is agreement in principle that the religious orders who ran the institutions will contribute towards the costs of compensation, expected to reach about £100 million. What is not at all clear is that the church contribution will be large enough and painful enough to represent a genuine act of recompense.

No one, I think, would argue that the State should not take a large share of the responsibility for compensating the victims. The children who ended up in institutions such as Letterfrack, Golden bridge and many others were committed by the courts and remained technically in the care of the State.

From 1932 onwards, when Eamon de Valera and his government suppressed the Carrigan report into child sexual abuse (as detailed by Finola Kennedy in a striking essay in a recent edition of Studies), the State deliberately averted its eyes from what was happening. It ought to pay for this neglect.

The person who commits the crime is far more guilty, however, than the one who chooses to ignore it. Civil servants, judges and ministers didn't beat, rape and torture children; members of religious orders did. It is right and proper that those orders should take responsibility for paying the largest share of the compensation. Although for practical reasons it may make sense for the State to make the payments in the first place, it should recover most of the money from the church.

What is happening in Canada is directly relevant, not least because in negotiations with the victims, the State has specifically cited the Canadian model. The Canadian experience suggests, however, that at some stage the State will have to take a very tough line with the churches. In recent cases, the Canadian courts have allocated responsibility for paying the victims on what seems to be a fair basis: 60 per cent to the church institution involved and 40 per cent to the government.

The churches, however, want to get away with paying an awful lot less. Initial church proposals on financial compensation have ranged from zero to a 20 per cent share. The religious groups propose, moreover, to provide their share in the form of church-run counselling and "cultural programmes" for abuse survivors. A spokesman for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops recently said it would be appropriate for the federal government to cover between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of total liabilities.

If this line is adopted by the church here, the State must have the moral courage to resist it. The victims must not be caught in the middle of a row between church and State, and the compensation scheme should go ahead, if necessary with the State making all the initial payments. But if justice is to be done, the institutions that inflicted so much pain must now take the pain of making restitution.

fotoole@irish-times.ie