In a development that has upended the lives of hundreds of child sexual abuse survivors seeking justice, an Australian court has approved a temporary halt to compensation payouts from the Oceania branch of the Christian Brothers, a centuries-old Catholic religious order that now claims it is on the brink of insolvency amid billions of dollars in outstanding abuse claims.
The order, which has operated schools and orphanages across Australia and New Zealand since the 1850s, told the court it faces an estimated A$774 million ($534 million) in liabilities to survivors of historical abuse, far exceeding its total accessible assets of just A$23 million in cash and A$216 million in held property. To address this shortfall, the group has proposed selling all its remaining properties to fund a partial settlement for claimants, and requested the 3-month payment moratorium to give survivors time to review the proposal, according to local media reports.
The moratorium, which will remain in place until the next court hearing scheduled for September, has put 32 pending abuse trials and 540 outstanding claims lodged through Australia’s National Redress Scheme on indefinite hold. For survivors waiting for closure, the sudden legal development has come as a devastating shock. One survivor told *The Guardian* they had been hoping to resolve their claim quickly to begin moving forward with their life, while another described feeling like they had been “stabbed in the back by a sharp, long, bladed knife.”
Granting the order’s request, Judge Scott Nixon argued the pause was necessary to “preserve the opportunity for the scheme to be considered by claimants, given that opportunity may be lost.” This move makes the Christian Brothers the first Catholic order in Australian history to pursue a formal liquidation process to resolve its abuse liabilities.
The court announcement comes amid long-standing scrutiny of the order’s financial practices, with the Australian government raising alarm over past transfers of valuable property from the Christian Brothers to Edmund Rice Education Australia (EREA), a separate entity established in 2007 to run the order’s Australian schools. Records reviewed by *The Guardian* show many of these transferred properties changed hands for as little as $1, and the Australian Financial Review estimates the collective current value of the shifted assets at nearly A$2 billion.
In response to the government’s concerns, a spokesman for EREA has insisted the organization is “not responsible for the financial affairs or liabilities of the Christian Brothers.” Representing the Australian government, lawyer Sera Mirzabegian told the court that any deliberate arrangement to shield assets or limit the order’s legal liability for abuse would be “very disturbing and concerning.”
Beyond the financial and legal fallout, the proposed sale of all the order’s property holdings has sparked panic among school communities across the region. At St Thomas of Canterbury College in Christchurch, New Zealand, the school’s board has already pledged to fight to retain the school’s current campus, which is held by a charitable trust overseen by the Christian Brothers.
The crisis unfolding in Oceania is far from an isolated case: widespread child sexual abuse in Christian Brother institutions has been uncovered across the globe over the past three decades. In 2013, the order’s North American chapter paid out A$16.5 million to settle claims from 400 survivors across the United States, and hundreds of additional cases have been documented in the United Kingdom and Canada.
In Australia, the scale of abuse in Christian Brothers facilities was first laid bare by a 2013 royal commission investigating institutional responses to child sexual abuse. The commission concluded that the order had “completely failed… to protect the most vulnerable children in their care,” finding that senior leadership had been aware of ongoing abuse as early as the 1950s and took no action to stop it or hold perpetrators accountable. Multiple members of the order have since been convicted of sexual assault, and the order’s Oceania branch continues to work in adult education, social justice outreach for refugees, asylum seekers, Indigenous communities, and disadvantaged youth per its public mission statement.