Australian Catholic Diocese said an abuse victim deserved $250,000.
A jury gave him $3.
Victims Barrister slammed church’s legal tactics & its failure to follow its own guidelines on historical clerical abuse, known as “Towards Healing’.
A jury gave him $3.
Victims Barrister slammed church’s legal tactics & its failure to follow its own guidelines on historical clerical abuse, known as “Towards Healing’.
Quote:A Victorian jury has delivered a stinging rebuke to the Catholic Church, awarding $3.3 million to the victim of a notorious paedophile after the church argued compensation should be only $250,000.
The Supreme Court case is the first time a civil trial against the Catholic Church has been tested before jurors.
On Friday, the jury delivered a verdict against the diocese of Wagga Wagga over abuse by priest Vincent Kiss. The verdict included handing the victim $1.3 million in exemplary damages, after the diocese initially claimed in its legal defence that it was unaware of Kiss’ abuse of the victim, despite him pleading guilty to criminal charges in 2002 and serving a seven-year prison sentence.
The archdiocese only conceded the abuse and amended its statement of defence on October 20, four days before the trial began.
Barrister Jonathan Brett, KC, representing the victim, slammed the church’s legal tactics and its failure to follow its own guidelines on responding to historical clerical abuse, known as “Towards Healing”, which caps compensation to victims at $150,000.
“Healing for the victims’ is in the heading, and this is what they are supposed to do, ‘a sensitive and compassionate response to the complainant must be the first priority in all cases of abuse’,” Brett told the jury of six on November 8.
“Words are cheap. That’s 2016, and they are still playing word games in 2023 and saying, ‘Well, all right, he’s pleaded guilty, but we still don’t say it happened’. Until basically the moment we enter the court door they finally say, ‘Well, yes, OK, it did happen’.”
Brett had also argued that exemplary damages were warranted because of the diocese’s failure to respond to an abuse complaint made against Kiss in 1968.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victo...5eizq.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
