Call for Catholic tax to fund abuse crisis

The Catholic Church receives many billions of dollars in state and federal health and these allocations normally can’t be used to cross-subsidise other church interests.

A special sex abuse tax on the ­multibillion-dollar Catholic health and education systems to help fund victim payments and ­address the monetary effects of ­declining support for the faith has been backed by a church figure with intimate knowledge of the long-term financial challenges.

Brendan Long, a former senior adviser to the nation’s bishops, has flagged a 1 per cent user-pays levy on Catholic health and education networks that would deliver as much as $160m each year to help fund abuse payments and demographic-related financial hurdles.

Dr Long said that the financial position was so bleak in some of the poorer dioceses that if they were registered under corporations law they could be trading while insolvent. He said the tax would ultimately be transferred to parents of Catholic schools, users of Catholic private healthcare services and through potentially higher aged-care fees.

Dr Long, in a paper outlining his concerns about church finances, has warned the abuse issue has the potential to “break the back of the church’s financial structure”, with the threat of “enduring super deficits” unless measures are taken to find other revenue streams.

The abuse issue was broader than just payments to victims but also costs associated with providing safer places of worship, training and compliance, with the potential for the crisis to run for many years.

“Claims made to date may represent simply the tip of the iceberg. Seen in fiscal terms the threat to Catholic Church financing is pervasive and enduring,” Dr Long said.

“If, as proposed above, the Catholic Church in Australia was facing a wicked problem of reducing revenue and fiscal deficit ­before the impact of the sexual abuse crisis, then its advent in ­fiscal terms expands the impact of this situation dramatically.

“Potentially, the requisite fiscal response to the sexual abuse crisis, in the absence of some measure to increase church revenue, could rise to a point where it could threaten to break the back of the Catholic Church’s financial structure, forcing it into a future state of enduring super deficits, unsustainable financial stress that effectively threatens its continued operation as we understand it today, with consequent impacts on pastoral and liturgical church life.”

The Catholic Church receives many billions of dollars in state and federal health and education grants and these allocations normally can’t be used to cross-sub­sidise other church interests.

However, church figures believe it could potentially seek a special voluntary levy to be placed on users of Catholic education and health that did not involve the use of any government grants.

Dr Long, an economist, is a senior research fellow at the Charles Sturt University’s Australian Centre of Christianity and Culture and a former strategic adviser to the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. He said in a paper on the issue of Catholic finances that more than $8bn of revenue flowed into the various Catholic health networks in 2019.

Dr Long said while one part of the church was under extreme ­financial pressure, the other – health and education – was thriving, challenging Pope Francis’s ­vision for the church.

“What is proposed is that the church’s service delivery operations can be made the subject of a tax the church imposes on itself,” he said.

“We can approach the spiritual, ascetical option Pope Francis calls for in economic concerns by taxing economic activity of the local church and then choosing to allocate this revenue to dealing with the fiscal crisis caused by dealing with the problem of historical church sexual (abuse).’’

Chrissie Foster, whose family was shattered by Catholic abuse, said the church should not fall back on a levy because it already had significant assets.

“Why should ordinary people pay a levy so the Catholic clergy can maintain their over-$30bn property portfolio?” she said.

Campaigner against child abuse Michael Advocate said an internal Catholic levy would just be “smoke and mirrors” and not address the core issues.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference declined to comment.