TJH Council head in Perth, CCI under fire

As Francis Sullivan, CEO of the Truth Justice and Healing Council, meets with some 250 members of the local Perth clergy,  the Church's insurance group is accused of dictating Church protocol on how to treat victims of sexual abuse.

Mr Sullivan said this week’s meeting at the Vietnamese Catholic Community Centre in Westminster, to discuss the upcoming Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, was overwhelmingly positive. 

Delegates responded with determination and compassion and all involved understand the importance of the Commission to victims and to the Church.

'For the Church’s part, the first step to coming to terms with the devastation and the enormity of child sexual abuse is to have an open and honest discussion. The silence that accompanies sexual abuse in the broader community is too often the same as the silence that goes on within institutions including the Catholic Church,' Mr Sullivan said.

The ABC reports that a psychologist who advised the Catholic Church committee that deals with sexual abuse says the church's insurance company dictated how victims should be treated under the Towards Healing protocol.

Dr Robert Grant is a US-based psychologist who specialises in abuse and trauma, has worked with the Catholic Church on sexual abuse issues in seven countries, and has written a number of books on clerical abuse. 

In the late 1990s, he was living in Sydney and advising the St John of God brothers in relation to the psychiatric facilities they ran. He was soon asked to help the National Committee for Professional Standards, which was working on the draft of Towards Healing, the church policy for dealing with clerical sexual abuse.

Dr Grant has told Lateline he was disturbed by how much influence Catholic Church Insurance had in formulating the church's protocol. "When I came into the process somewhere in 1996/97, CCI was at every meeting,' he said. 'They either had one or two of their senior representatives, and/or a lawyer at each of the meetings I attended."

Catholic Church Insurance head Peter Rush, who joined CCI as a manager in 1998 before becoming CEO in 2009, rejected the claims. "I have no knowledge of Mr Grant, the comment attributed to 'a senior official of CCI' or of the alleged destruction of personnel records...and I do not accept that any senior officer of CCI would have engaged in the inappropriate destruction of documents."

Sister Angela Ryan, a former committee member, has told Lateline she has no recollection of the incident described by Robert Grant.