Land title records obtained by Guardian Australia show that Christian Brothers-owned property has been used to house at least two convicted child sex offenders — Brother Rex Elmer and Brother Peter Toomey — even as the order tells the New South Wales Supreme Court it can no longer afford to pay survivors' compensation claims The Guardian.

The disclosure follows the Guardian's July 3 report that the order kept nine convicted abusers within its ranks, citing in court documents a "Gospel imperative" to "care for all Brothers" and "the needy" The Guardian. Brother Gerard John Brady, province leader of the Christian Brothers Oceania, is named in an affidavit filed in that matter.

The order's constitution obliges it to fund current brothers regardless of their criminal history: housing, rates, electricity, gas and water, health insurance, reimbursement for medical, dental and physiotherapy costs, a Community Living Allowance of $1,200 a month, vehicles and running costs, retreat and spiritual-development funding, and some food and entertainment expenses The Guardian. That same document set is central to the order's claim, made in June 2026, that it is close to insolvency and unable to meet the claims of survivors through the courts.

Toomey's case illustrates the institutional pattern the royal commission later documented nationally. He was convicted in November 2005 on 10 counts of indecent assault against students at Trinity College, Brunswick, dating to the 1970s, and jailed again in 2019 for assaulting two boys aged 14 and 15. Senior Christian Brothers officials were warned as early as 1973 that Toomey had been involved in an "indiscretion" with a boy; within two years they were told he was "too familiar in his touching of the boys." Rather than removing him, the order moved him through Parkville, Forest Hill and Cathedral College in quick succession — at Cathedral College he was permitted to run the choir, the altar boys and the school's "Sexuality Programme." He was later sent to Kearney College at Bindoon, Western Australia, in 1990, where a further "indiscretion" report surfaced in 1994, which he admitted. Despite another complaint in August 2000, he remained in teaching positions at three schools until the end of that year — nearly three decades after the first warning reached senior officials.

Elmer's history runs on a parallel track. He was convicted of abusing children at St Vincent's Boys Home, a Christian Brothers facility for wards of the state, in the 1970s, targeting orphans with what the Guardian describes as highly traumatic backgrounds. He has been jailed on three separate occasions, most recently in 2021.

A moratorium against a backdrop of asset moves

The financial mechanics matter as much as the individual histories. On June 23, ABC News reported the Christian Brothers had proposed selling their remaining assets to fund compensation payouts ABC News. Days later, the Australian government told the court it would be "obviously disturbing" if $1 property sales by the order ended up depriving survivors of the compensation those assets were meant to secure The Guardian. On July 2, the NSW Supreme Court approved an immediate moratorium staying all current and future proceedings against the Christian Brothers' Province Entities Edmund Rice, a pause the BBC also reported as evidence the order had told the court it was going broke BBC. In response, survivors launched a bid in the Supreme Court of Victoria to redirect their claims toward Edmund Rice Education Australia, an entity that has benefited from the order's wealth The Guardian.

The sequence — insolvency declaration, moratorium, asset-sale proposal, survivor litigation targeting an affiliated entity — follows a template increasingly familiar in institutional abuse cases, where corporate restructuring and claims of financial exhaustion arrive in close proximity to compensation deadlines. Whether the Christian Brothers' finances genuinely constrain its capacity to pay, or whether structural transfers have pre-emptively shielded assets, is now precisely the question before two courts.

That question sits atop a much longer documentary record. Complaints about sexual and physical abuse of children in Christian Brothers care were logged as early as 1919 ABC News, and evidence to child sex abuse hearings found the Brothers running children's homes in Western Australia between 1947 and 1968 did not treat the abuse of students as a crime ABC News. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse — which sat through 57 public hearings and took evidence from 1,200 witnesses Royal Commission — heard that 281 Christian Brothers in Australia were subject to one or more claims or substantiated complaints The Guardian. Data compiled across 10 Catholic religious institutes found the order accounted for 22% of all claims — 1,610 in total — the highest concentration recorded at St Patrick's College in Victoria ABC News. Case Study 11 of the commission separately examined the order's handling of abuse at Castledare Junior Orphanage in Western Australia Royal Commission, and as recently as 2022 a former Nudgee College headmaster, Stephen McLaughlin, was convicted of child sexual abuse committed as a Christian Brother ABC News.

Set against that history, the current dispute is less about whether the institution failed survivors — that finding is largely settled — than about whether it now has the capacity, or the willingness, to pay for it.