While the first criminal trial of a Roman Catholic church
official accused of covering up child sexual abuse has drawn national attention
to Philadelphia, the church has been quietly engaged in equally consequential
battles over abuse, not in courtrooms but in state legislatures around the
country.
The fights concern proposals to loosen statutes of limitations, which impose
deadlines on when victims can bring civil suits or prosecutors can press
charges. These time limits, set state by state, have held down the number of
criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against all kinds of people accused of
child abuse — not just clergy members, but also teachers, youth counselors and
family members accused of incest.
Victims and their advocates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New
York are pushing legislators to lengthen the limits or abolish them altogether,
and to open temporary “windows” during which victims can file lawsuits no matter
how long after the alleged abuse occurred.
The Catholic Church has successfully beaten back such proposals in many states,
arguing that it is difficult to get reliable evidence when decades have passed
and that the changes seem more aimed at bankrupting the church than easing the
pain of victims.
Already reeling from about $2.5 billion spent on legal fees, settlements and
prevention programs relating to child sexual abuse, the church has fought
especially hard against the window laws, which it sees as an open-ended and
unfair exposure for accusations from the distant past. In at least two states,
Colorado and New York, the church even hired high-priced lobbying and public
relations firms to supplement its own efforts. Colorado parishes handed out
postcards for churchgoers to send to their representatives, while in Ohio,
bishops themselves pressed legislators to water down a bill.
The outcome of these legislative battles could have far greater consequences for
the prosecution of child molesters, compensation of victims and financial health
of some Catholic dioceses, legal experts say, than the trial of a church
official in Philadelphia, where the jury is currently deliberating.
Changing the statute of limitations “has turned out to be the primary front for
child sex abuse victims,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N.
Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University who represents plaintiffs in sexual
abuse suits.
“Even when you have an institution admitting they knew about the abuse, the
perpetrator admitting that he did it, and corroborating evidence, if the statute
of limitations has expired, there won’t be any justice,” she said.
The church’s arguments were forcefully made by Patrick Brannigan, executive
director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference, in testimony before the State
Legislature in January opposing a proposal to abolish the limits in civil cases.
“How can an institution conceivably defend itself against a claim that is 40, 50
or 60 years old?” Mr. Brannigan said. “Statutes of limitation exist because
witnesses die and memories fade.”
“This bill would not protect a single child,” he said, while “it would generate
an enormous transfer of money in lawsuits to lawyers.”
Timing is a major factor in abuse cases because many victims are unable to talk
about abuse or face their accusers until they reach their 30s, 40s or later,
putting the crime beyond the reach of the law. In states where the statutes are
most restrictive, like New York, the cutoff for bringing a criminal case is age
23 for most serious sexual crimes other than rape that occurred when the victim
was a minor.
In more than 30 states, limits have already been lifted or significantly eased
on the criminal prosecutions of some types of abuses, according to Professor
Hamilton. The Supreme Court ruled that changes in criminal limits cannot be
retroactive, so they will affect only recent and future crimes.
In New York, the Catholic bishops said they would support a modest increase in
the age of victims in criminal or civil cases, to 28. But their lobbying, along
with that of ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, has so far halted proposals that
would allow a one-year window for civil suits for abuses from the past. The
bishops say the provision unfairly targets the church because public schools,
the site of much abuse, and municipalities have fought successfully to be
exempted.
The New Jersey proposal to abolish time limits for civil suits could pass this
summer, said its sponsor in the Senate, Joseph Vitale, a Democrat of Woodbridge.
The main opposition has come from the Catholic Church, he said. Mr. Brannigan of
the Catholic Conference has testified at hearings, and bishops have “reached out
to scores of legislators,” Mr. Vitale said, warning that an onslaught of
lawsuits could bankrupt their dioceses.
California was the first state to pass a one-year “window” law to bring civil
suits, in 2003, and those involved say that the legislation moved so quickly
that the church barely responded. But the experience proved a cautionary tale
for the church: more than 550 lawsuits flooded in.
Since then, only two states have passed similar laws: Delaware, in 2007, and
Hawaii, in April. Window legislation has been defeated in Colorado, Ohio,
Maryland, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and New York.
Joan Fitz-Gerald, former president of the Colorado Senate, who proposed the
window legislation, was an active Catholic who said she was stunned to find in
church one Sunday in 2006 that the archdiocese had asked priests to raise the
issue during a Mass and distribute lobbying postcards.
“It was the most brutal thing I’ve ever been through,” she said of the church
campaign. “The politics, the deception, the lack of concern for not only the
children in the past, but for children today.” She has since left the church.
The Massachusetts Catholic Conference has spoken out strongly against a bill
that would eliminate both criminal and civil statutes of limitations, but
advocates still hope to win a two-year window for filing civil claims.
If that happens, “we’ll see a lot more victims come forward, and we’ll find out
more about who the abusers are,” said Jetta Bernier, director of the advocacy
group Massachusetts Citizens for Children.
The landmark trial of Msgr. William J. Lynn in Philadelphia, who is accused of
allowing predators to remain in ministry, almost did not happen because of the
statute of limitations.
A scathing grand jury report in 2005 described dozens of victims and offending
priests and said that officials, including Philadelphia’s cardinal, had “excused
and enabled the abuse.” But the law in place at the time of the crimes required
victims to come forth by age 23. “As a result,” the report said, “these priests
and officials will necessarily escape criminal prosecution.”
But victims emerged whose abuse fell within the deadline and in 2011, a new
grand jury brought charges against Monsignor Lynn, who had supervised priest
assignments.
Pennsylvania expanded the limits, and for crimes from 2007 on, charges will be
possible up to the time that victims reach age 50. Advocates are now pushing to
abolish the statute of limitations for child sex abuse and open a window for
civil suits over long-past abuses. But the legislation appears stalled in the
face of church opposition.
The new archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, who led the successful
campaign to defeat such a bill in Colorado, says that current restrictions exist
for “sound legal reasons.”
The landmark trial of a senior official of the Philadelphia
Archdiocese who is accused of shielding priests who sexually abused children and
reassigning them to unwary parishes began on Monday with prosecutors charging
that the official “paid lip service to child protection and protected the church
at all costs.”
The defendant, Msgr. William J. Lynn, 61, is the first Roman Catholic supervisor
in the country to be tried on felony charges of endangering children and
conspiracy — not on allegations that he molested children himself, but that he
protected suspect priests and reassigned them to jobs where they continued to
rape, grope or otherwise abuse boys and girls.
One of Monsignor Lynn’s lines of defense was indicated in an opening statement
when his lawyers suggested that he had acted responsibly and reported
allegations of abuse to higher officials, including a recently deceased
cardinal.
The trial is a milestone, legal experts said, in the legal battles lasting
decades over sex abuse by priests. For years, many Catholic dioceses have been
battered by civil suits seeking monetary damages for failing to stop errant
priests. More recently, prosecutors have brought criminal charges against
abusers.
“What has not happened up to now is for church officials to be held criminally
accountable,” said Timothy D. Lytton, a professor of law at the Albany Law
School and an expert on Catholic abuse cases.
Whatever the outcome, he said, this trial “will dramatically increase the
pressure on diocese officials to fulfill the church’s promises to be more
transparent and accountable.”
More immediately, the trial promises to further roil the 1.5 million-member
Philadelphia Archdiocese, which was convulsed by grand jury reports in 2005 and
2011 alleging that it had not responded forcefully to dozens of credible abuse
complaints and had allowed known offenders to have continued contact with
children.
From 1992 to 2004, Monsignor Lynn, who maintains he is innocent, was secretary
of the clergy in the archdiocese, directing priests’ job assignments and
handling complaints about their behavior.
An assistant district attorney, Jacqueline Coelho, told the jury that Monsignor
Lynn had repeatedly played down credible reports of child abuse, stashing them
away in secret files.
“The victims are met with skepticism, and the priests are believed at all
costs,” Ms. Coelho said in a 58-minute opening statement in Common Pleas Court.
The scathing grand jury report released in January 2011, which led to the
charges, described examples in which Monsignor Lynn “knowingly allowed priests
who had sexually abused minors to be assigned to positions where unsuspecting
parents and teachers would entrust children to their care.”
The report alleged that Monsignor Lynn had acted with the leader of the
archdiocese at the time — Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, who died in January —
to shield the archdiocese from scandal and financial liability.
As the trial began, Monsignor Lynn, sitting between two lawyers and dressed in a
black suit with a clerical collar, answered “not guilty” to all charges. He
could face up to 28 years in prison if convicted of the two counts of
endangerment and two counts of conspiracy.
Thomas Bergstrom, a defense lawyer, said in his opening statement on Monday that
his client had reported abuse allegations to senior, clergy including Cardinal
Bevilacqua.
“Everything that Monsignor Lynn did with respect to the allegations of abuse was
put in writing and sent up the chain,” Mr. Bergstrom said.
He also attacked prosecution assertions that Monsignor Lynn had been responsible
for appointing suspect priests to positions where they could prey on more
children. “The only man in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that could appoint a
priest to any location is Cardinal Bevilacqua,” Mr. Bergstrom said.
Mr. Bergstrom also said the cardinal had directed the shredding of a list of
suspected or actual sex offenders Monsignor Lynn obtained from a “secret archive
file.”
The trial is likely to feature the videotaped testimony of Cardinal Bevilacqua,
who died of cancer and dementia at age 88.
The 2011 grand jury report stated that Monsignor Lynn “was carrying out the
cardinal’s policies exactly as the cardinal directed,” but that because of gaps
in evidence and Cardinal Bevilacqua’s ill health, “we have reluctantly decided
not to recommend charges” against him.
Prosecutors have not ruled out further indictments of senior church officials.
Monsignor Lynn is being tried together with a priest, the Rev. James J. Brennan,
49, who is charged with the attempted rape of a 14-year-old boy in 1996, after
Monsignor Lynn failed to act on complaints about Father Brennan. Father Brennan
also pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer questioned the accuser’s credibility.
The trial originally was to include a third defendant, Edward V. Avery, 69, a
defrocked priest who was charged with raping a 10-year-old altar boy in 1999,
years after Mr. Avery had been reported for sexual abuse and had been treated at
a hospital for sex offenders, facts that Monsignor Lynn allegedly knew. Last
week, Mr. Avery pleaded guilty to rape and conspiracy was sentenced to two and a
half to five years in prison.
As the trial began, Judge M. Teresa Sarmina warned the jury of six men and six
women to disregard Mr. Avery’s absence. It was not clear if his guilty plea
would figure in the trial.
Prosecutors intend to present more than 20 other examples of abuse charges that
they assert were mishandled by the archdiocese. The trial is expected to last
for at least two months.
In October, the bishop of the Kansas City Diocese was indicted on a misdemeanor
charge, accused of failing to report suspected child abuse. The bishop, Robert
W. Finn, allegedly waited six months to tell the police that a priest had been
taking lewd photographs of girls. A trial is scheduled for September, although
on Tuesday a judge will consider the bishop’s motion to dismiss the charges.
The felony trial of Monsignor Lynn, alleging a systematic cover-up of abuses
over many years, appears likely to have a far broader impact on the church, said
David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by
Priests, an advocacy and support group known as SNAP.
“To see one of their peers facing jail time for what he has done over many years
to endanger kids,” he said, “has the possibility of sending a much more alarming
message to current and former Catholic officials across the country.”
It has been
seven years since the Roman Catholic Church’s investigative board of laity
warned that, beyond the 700 priests dismissed for sexually abusing children,
“there must be consequences” for the diocesan leaders who recycled criminal
priests through unsuspecting parishes. American church authorities have done
nothing to heed this caution.
Now state prosecutors in Missouri have shown the courage the prelates lacked.
They indicted Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph for
allegedly failing to notify criminal authorities about a popular parish priest
who is accused of taking pornographic photographs of young parochial schoolgirls
— despite community alarms and evidence submitted to the diocese.
Bishop Finn, who professed his innocence under the indictment, had previously
outraged church faithful by acknowledging that he knew of the photos last
December but did not turn them over to the police until May.
This occurred despite the requirements of state law — and the bishop’s own
policy vows — that suspected crimes against children be immediately reported.
The priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, continued to attend church events and
allegedly abuse children until he was indicted this year on 13 counts of child
pornography.
Bishop Finn is only the first ranking prelate in the nationwide scandal to be
held criminally liable for the serial misbehavior of a priest in his diocese.
Investigations have shown that many more diocesan officials across the country
worked assiduously to bury the scandal from public view over the years, despite
continuing damage inflicted on thousands of innocent youngsters.
In 2004, the nation’s bishops promised unqualified cooperation with law
enforcement. They instituted zero-tolerance reforms for priests but failed to
create a credible process for bringing bishops to account. Missouri officials
deserve credit for puncturing the myth that church law and a bishop’s authority
can somehow take precedence over criminal law — and the safety of children.
July 18,
2011
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Cardinal
Justin Rigali, the Roman Catholic leader of Philadelphia, is expected to
announce his retirement on Tuesday, some five months after the 1.5
million-member archdiocese was convulsed by evidence that officials had ignored
sexual-abuse charges against dozens of currently active priests.
Cardinal Rigali, 76, who is planning to step down later this year, will be
replaced by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver, 66, a Native American who is
known for his aggressive public opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage,
according to people familiar with the plans.
The changes are to be announced by the Vatican on Tuesday. The Archdiocese of
Philadelphia has scheduled a news conference for 10 a.m. Tuesday at which
Cardinal Rigali is expected to appear with his successor.
In April, Cardinal Rigali turned 76, which is the customary retirement age for
bishops, although some have continued to serve for years beyond.
“Because he’s over 75, you can’t make the case that he resigning because of the
scandals,” said Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow of the Woodstock
Theological Center at Georgetown University and a Jesuit priest. “Certainly, the
Vatican never wants to give the appearance of having someone resign under
pressure.”
But Cardinal Rigali’s tenure in Philadelphia will inevitably be linked to the
mishandling of sexual-abuse cases, which had gone on for decades but erupted
this year into what Father Reese called “a disaster for the church.”
A grand jury report in February accused the archdiocese of failing to report or
remove predatory priests over the decades and said that as many as 37 priests
remained active in the ministry despite accusations against them of sexual abuse
or other inappropriate behavior with minors. The report was particularly
shocking because an earlier grand jury, in 2005, reported accusations of abuse
by 63 priests. In 2002, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted
a zero-tolerance policy and promised to purge the priesthood of sexual
predators.
Cardinal Rigali initially responded to the February grand jury report with what
critics called evasive language, saying there were no priests in active ministry
“who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor
against them.” But then in March, in a reversal, the archdiocese suspended 21
priests in what experts said was the most sweeping action of its kind for the
Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
The grand jury report prompted the indictment of four priests and a parochial
school teacher, and included the first criminal charges in the United States
against a senior church official for covering up abusive behavior by priests.
The total number of priests suspended is now 29.
After the suspensions, Cardinal Rigali apologized for the abuses, saying in a
statement: “I am truly sorry for the harm done to the victims of sexual abuse,
as well as to the members of our community who suffer as a result of this great
evil and crime.”
Cardinal Rigali previously served as archbishop of St. Louis. He was appointed
to take over the Philadelphia archdiocese in 2003 and also elevated to the
College of Cardinals that year.
Some Catholics in Philadelphia said Cardinal Rigali’s lack of forceful
leadership to weed out sex abusers had caused morale problems. Tom Maroon, a
member of the St. Francis of Assisi Parish in the Germantown section of
Philadelphia, said Monday that Cardinal Rigali had not been open enough with the
public about suspect priests. “He didn’t want to shake things up,” Mr. Maroon
said.
The man poised to succeed him, Archbishop Chaput, has led the Denver archdiocese
since 1997. He has stood out even among Roman Catholic leaders for his
aggressive promotion in the public arena of Catholic beliefs. In this respect,
at least, he is likely to be a more visible presence in Philadelphia than
Cardinal Rigali has been.
Advocates for sex-abuse victims expressed disappointment at the prospect of
Archbishop Chaput’s arrival. David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network
of Those Abused By Priests, described his record in fighting abuse as “dismal”
and said he had opposed legislative proposals to give child victims more time to
file civil claims.
David Trickett, president of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, described
Archbishop Chaput as a strong-willed man of integrity.
The archbishop has hurled himself into public debates but he has also made a
point of reaching out to groups he disagreed with, Mr. Trickett said. Still, he
said, his outspokenness would leave a mixed legacy. “There are people who think
he is absolutely the best thing, and there are people who go absolutely in the
opposite direction,” Mr. Trickett said.
SEATTLE — A
Roman Catholic religious order in the Northwest has agreed to pay $166 million
to more than 500 victims of sexual abuse, many of whom are American Indians and
Alaska Natives who were abused decades ago at Indian boarding schools and in
remote villages, lawyers for the plaintiffs said Friday.
The settlement, with the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, known as the
Northwest Jesuits, is the largest abuse settlement by far from a Catholic
religious order, as opposed to a diocese, and it is one of the largest abuse
settlements of any kind by the Catholic Church. The Jesuits are the church’s
largest religious order, and their focus is education. The Oregon Province
includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.
“There is a huge number of victims, in part because these Native American
communities were remote and vulnerable, and in part because of a policy by the
Jesuits, even though they deny it, of sending problem priests to these far-off
regions,” said Terry McKiernan of Bishopaccountability.org, a victims’ advocacy
group that tracks abuse cases.
The province released a statement saying it would not comment on the settlement
announced by the plaintiffs’ lawyers because it was involved in bankruptcy
litigation. The bankruptcy stems from previous abuse settlements, totaling about
$55 million, reached several years ago. A small group of victims and their
lawyers have been negotiating the current settlement for more than a year as
part of the province’s bankruptcy-ordered restructuring.
An insurer for the province is paying the bulk of the settlement, which still is
subject to approval by hundreds of other victims and by a federal judge.
John Allison, a lawyer based in Spokane, Wash., represented many clients who
were abused in the late 1960s and early 1970s while they were students at St.
Mary’s Mission in Omak, Wash., near the reservation of the Colville Confederated
Tribes, one of the largest reservations in the country. The Jesuits ran the St.
Mary’s school until the 1970s, when federal policies began to encourage more
Indian control. St. Mary’s is now closed, though its building stands beside a
new school.
Mr. Allison noted that English was not the native language for some of the
students at the time of the abuse. Some were 6 and 7 years old and came from
difficult family situations. Some were orphans. At the same time, many Jesuit
priests were not happy to have been assigned to such remote places.
“They let down a very vulnerable population,” Mr. Allison said.
Lawyers representing some of the victims initially suggested they would go after
assets of some of the region’s large Jesuit institutions, including Gonzaga
University and Seattle University. But the settlement does not involve them, and
their future vulnerability is unclear. Mr. Allison said some of the accused
priests, now in their 80s, live at Gonzaga under strict supervision.
Mr. Allison and another lawyer, Leander James, of Idaho, said the settlement
required the province to eventually apologize to the victims.
One of the plaintiffs, Dorothea Skalicky, was living on the Nez Perce Indian
Reservation in northern Idaho in the 1970s when she said she was abused by a
Jesuit priest who ran Sacred Heart Church, in Lapwai. Ms. Skalicky, now 42, said
that her family lived across from the church for several years, and that she was
abused from age 6 to 8.
“My family looked up to him,” Ms. Skalicky said of the priest, who is deceased.
“He was somebody high up that was respected by the community and my parents.”
The church, she said, “was supposed to be a safe place.”
Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York.
The Roman
Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Del., agreed late Wednesday to settle for $77
million with 146 victims of sexual abuse by clergy members and to release
internal church documents about how the church hierarchy handled the allegations
of abuse.
The sticking point in the negotiations was not the money, but the documents,
according to those involved. The victims insisted that the diocese release the
documents uncensored, and make them publicly available on the Internet.
The committee and the diocese finally agreed that an arbitrator would settle
disagreements over redactions before making the documents public.
The Wilmington diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009 in
response to the abuse lawsuits, seeking a consolidated settlement. The monetary
award is less than the settlements in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Calif.,
Boston and Covington, Ky., but includes more assurances for the victims that the
promised documents will actually be released.
Delaware and California passed laws in recent years that allowed people alleging
abuse to file lawsuits after the statute of limitations had expired. The
Catholic Church in several other states, including New York, has led the fight
against similar “window legislation.”
In Wilmington on Thursday, both sides said they were pleased with the agreement,
which included a list of nonmonetary provisions.
The diocese agreed to have priests sign a statement every five years affirming
that they are not aware of undisclosed abuse of minors. And the diocese will
place plaques in its schools saying that abuse of children “shall not be
tolerated.”
Matt Conaty, an abuse victim who served as co-chair of the creditors committee
that negotiated on behalf of those abused, said, “We were seeking some measure
of monetary justice, but that was secondary to the concrete child protection
measures and the transparency.”
Mr. Conaty, who is 41 and works in newspaper marketing, said of the two
principals accused of abuse at his old Catholic high school: “Would this plaque
have stopped them? I doubt it, because I think they were sick and I think they
were criminals. But there were teachers who knew there were red flags, and could
have done more.”
July 1, 2010
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
In its long struggle to grapple with sexual abuse, the Vatican
often cites as a major turning point the decision in 2001 to give the office led
by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the authority to cut through a morass of
bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly.
The decision, in an apostolic letter from Pope John Paul II, earned Cardinal
Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, a reputation as the Vatican insider who most
clearly recognized the threat the spreading sexual abuse scandals posed to the
Roman Catholic Church.
But church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that
2001 decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering
light.
The Vatican took action only after bishops from English-speaking nations became
so concerned about resistance from top church officials that the Vatican
convened a secret meeting to hear their complaints — an extraordinary example of
prelates from across the globe collectively pressing their superiors for reform,
and one that had not previously been revealed.
And the policy that resulted from that meeting, in contrast to the way it has
been described by the Vatican, was not a sharp break with past practices. It was
mainly a belated reaffirmation of longstanding church procedures that at least
one bishop attending the meeting argued had been ignored for too long, according
to church documents and interviews.
The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years
earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two
decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that
authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility
in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, an outspoken auxiliary bishop emeritus from Sydney,
Australia, who attended the secret meeting in 2000, said that despite numerous
warnings, top Vatican officials, including Benedict, took far longer to wake up
to the abuse problems than many local bishops did.
“Why did the Vatican end up so far behind the bishops out on the front line, who
with all their faults, did change — they did develop,” he said. “Why was the
Vatican so many years behind?”
Cardinal Ratzinger, of course, had not yet become pope, a divinely ordained
office not accustomed to direction from below. John Paul, his longtime superior,
often dismissed allegations of pedophilia by priests as an attack on the church
by its enemies. Supporters say that Cardinal Ratzinger would have preferred to
take steps earlier to stanch the damage in certain cases.
But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of
nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction.
More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal
Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the
scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions
that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.
As pope, Benedict has met with victims of sexual abuse three times. He belatedly
reopened an investigation into the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the
Legionaries of Christ, a powerful religious order — and a protégé of John Paul’s
— and ultimately removed him from ministry. He gave American bishops greater
leeway to take a tough line on abuse in the United States, and recently accepted
the resignations of several bishops elsewhere. And on June 11, at an event in
St. Peter’s Square meant to celebrate priests, he begged “forgiveness from God
and from the persons involved” and promised to do “everything possible” to
prevent future abuse.
But today the abuse crisis is still raging in the Catholic heartland of Europe:
civil investigators in Belgium last week took the rare step of raiding church
headquarters and the home of a former archbishop. The Vatican under Benedict is
still responding to abuse by priests at its own pace, and it is being besieged
by an outside world that wants it to move faster and more decisively.
Vatican officials, who declined to answer detailed questions related to
Benedict’s history, say that the church will announce another round of changes
to its canon laws, as it did in 2001, so that the church can improve its
response to the abuse problem.
But the suggestion that more reforms are ahead is a nod to the fact that there
is still widespread confusion among many bishops about how to handle allegations
of abuse, and that their approaches are remarkably uneven from country to
country.
National bishops’ conferences in some countries have adopted their own norms and
standards. But several decades after sexual abuse by priests became a problem,
Benedict has not yet instituted a universal set of rules.
Scandal and Confusion
The sexual abuse scandal first caught much of the world’s attention in 2002,
with reports that the Boston archdiocese had been covering up for molesters for
years. But the alarm bells had already been sounding for nearly two decades in
many countries. In Lafayette, La., in 1984, the Rev. Gilbert Gauthé admitted to
molesting 37 youngsters. In 1989, a sensational case erupted at an orphanage in
the Canadian province of Newfoundland. By the mid-1990s, about 40 priests and
brothers in Australia faced abuse allegations. In 1994, the Irish government was
brought down when it botched the extradition of a notorious pedophile priest.
Bishops had a variety of disciplinary tools at their disposal — including the
power to remove accused priests from contact with children and to suspend them
from ministry altogether — that they could use without the Vatican’s direct
approval.
Some used this authority to sideline abusive priests, minimizing the damage
inflicted on their victims. Other bishops clearly made things worse, by
shuffling abusers from one assignment to the next, never telling parishioners or
reporting priests to the police.
But as court cases, financial settlements and media coverage mounted, many
prelates looked to the Vatican for leadership and clarity on how to prosecute
abusers under canon law and when to bring cases to the attention of the civil
authorities. In the worst cases, involving serial offenders who denied
culpability and resisted discipline, some bishops sought the Vatican’s guidance
on how to dismiss them from the priesthood.
For this, bishops needed the Vatican’s help. Dismissing a priest is not like
disbarring a lawyer or stripping a doctor of his medical license. In Catholic
theology, ordaining a priest creates an indelible mark; to return him to the lay
state required the approval of the pope.
Yet throughout the ’80s and ’90s, bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss
abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal
process, with contradicting laws and overlapping jurisdictions in Rome,
according to church documents and interviews with bishops and canon lawyers.
Besides Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, bishops
were sending off their files on abuse cases to the Congregations for the Clergy,
for Bishops, for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and for
the Evangelization of Peoples — plus the Vatican’s Secretariat of State; its
appeals court, the Apostolic Signatura; and the Pontifical Council for
Legislative Texts.
“There was confusion everywhere,” said Archbishop Philip Edward Wilson of
Adelaide, Australia.
A new Code of Canon Law issued in 1983 only muddied things further, among other
things by setting a five-year statute of limitations within which abuse cases
could be prosecuted.
During this period, the three dozen staff members working for Cardinal Ratzinger
at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were busy pursuing other
problems. These included examining supernatural phenomena, like apparitions of
the Virgin Mary, so that hoaxes did not “corrupt the faith,” according to the
Rev. Brian Mulcahy, a former member of the staff. Other sections weighed
requests by divorced Catholics to remarry and vetted the applications of former
priests who wanted to be reinstated.
The heart of the office, though, was its doctrinal section. Cardinal Ratzinger,
a German theologian appointed prefect of the congregation in 1981, aimed his
renowned intellectual firepower at what he saw as “a fundamental threat to the
faith of the church” — the liberation theology movement sweeping across Latin
America.
As Father Gauthé was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was
publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church
should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a
Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine. Later, he also reined in a Dutch
theologian who thought lay people should be able to perform priestly functions,
and an American who taught that Catholics could dissent from church teachings
about abortion, birth control, divorce and homosexuality.
Different Focus for Cardinal
Cardinal Ratzinger also focused on reining in national bishops’ conferences,
several of which, independent of Rome, had begun confronting the sexual abuse
crisis and devising policies to address it in their countries. He declared that
such conferences had “no theological basis” and “do not belong to the structure
of the church.” Individual bishops, he reaffirmed, reigned supreme in their
dioceses and reported only to the authority of the pope in Rome.
Another hint of his priorities came at a synod in 1990, when a bishop from
Calgary gingerly mentioned the growing sexual abuse problem in Canada. When
Cardinal Ratzinger rose to speak, however, it was of a different crisis: the
diminishing image of the priesthood since the Second Vatican Council, and the
“huge drop” in the numbers of priests as many resigned.
That concern — that the irrevocable commitment to the priesthood was being
undermined by the exodus of priests leaving to marry or because they were simply
disenchanted — had already led Cardinal Ratzinger to block the dismissal of at
least one priest convicted of molestation, documents show.
“Look at it from the perspective of priestly commitment,” said the Rev. Joseph
Fessio, a former student of Cardinal Ratzinger’s and founder of the conservative
publishing house Ignatius Press. “You want to get married? You’re still a
priest. You’re a sex offender? Well, you’re still a priest. Rome is looking at
it from the objective reality of the priesthood.”
After another abuse scandal in 1992 in Fall River, Mass., bishops in the United
States pressed the Vatican for an alternative to the slow and arcane canonical
justice system. Without a full canonical trial, clerics accused of abuse could
not be dismissed from the priesthood against their will (although a bishop could
impose some restrictions short of that). In 1993, John Paul said he had heard
the American bishops’ pleas and convened a joint commission of American and
Vatican canonists to propose improvements.
John Paul rejected its proposal to let bishops dismiss priests using
administrative procedures, without canonical trials. But he agreed to raise the
age of majority to 18 from 16 for child-molestation cases. More important, he
extended the statute of limitations to 10 years after the victim’s 18th
birthday.
It is not known whether Cardinal Ratzinger spoke up in the internal
deliberations that led to the two changes, which applied only to the United
States.
But those changes clearly did not go far enough. And as the crisis steadily
spread in other countries, bishops and church administrators from across the
English-speaking world began meeting to compare notes on how to respond to it.
After gathering on their own in 1996 and 1998, they demanded that the Curia, the
Vatican’s administration, meet with them in Rome in 2000.
Frustrations Boil Over
The visiting bishops had reached the boiling point. After flailing about for 20
years, with little guidance from Rome, as stories about pedophile priests
embroiled the church in lawsuits, shame and scandal, they had flown in to Rome
from Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South
Africa, the United States and the West Indies.
Many came out of frustration: the Vatican had too often thwarted bishops’
attempts to oust pedophile priests in their jurisdictions. Yet they had high
hopes that they would make the case for reform. Nearly every major Vatican
office was represented in the gathering, held in the same Vatican hotel that was
built to house cardinals electing a new pope.
“The message we wanted to get across was: if individuals are to hide behind
church law and use that law to impede the ability of bishops to discipline
priests, then we have to have a new way of moving forward,” said Eamonn Walsh,
auxiliary bishop of Dublin, one of 17 bishops who attended from overseas. (He
was one of several Irish bishops who offered the pope their resignations last
year because of the abuse scandal, but his has not been accepted.)
Yet many at the meeting grew dismayed as, over four long days in early April
2000, they heard senior Vatican officials dismiss clergy sexual abuse as a
problem confined to the English-speaking world, and emphasize the need to
protect the rights of accused priests over ensuring the safety of children,
according to interviews with 10 church officials who attended the meeting.
Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, then the head of the Congregation for the
Clergy, set the tone, playing down sexual abuse as an unavoidable fact of life,
and complaining that lawyers and the media were unfairly focused on it,
according to a copy of his prepared remarks. What is more, he asked, is it not
contradictory for people to be so outraged by sexual abuse when society also
promotes sexual liberation?
Another Vatican participant even observed that many pedophile priests had Irish
surnames, a remark that offended delegates from Ireland.
“Prejudices came out,” said Bishop Robinson of Australia. “There were some very
silly things said at times.”
Though disappointed, the visiting bishops were not entirely surprised.
“It wasn’t that there was bad will in Rome,” Bishop Walsh said. “They just
didn’t have the firsthand experience that the dioceses were having around the
world — experience with the manipulative, devious ways of the perpetrators. If
the perpetrator said, ‘I didn’t do it,’ they would say, ‘He wouldn’t be telling
a lie, he has to be telling the truth, and he’s innocent until proven guilty.’ ”
An exception to the prevailing attitude, several participants recalled, was
Cardinal Ratzinger. He attended the sessions only intermittently and seldom
spoke up. But in his only extended remarks, he made clear that he saw things
differently from others in the Curia.
“The speech he gave was an analysis of the situation, the horrible nature of the
crime, and that it had to be responded to promptly,” recalled Archbishop Wilson
of Australia, who was at the meeting in 2000. “I felt, this guy gets it, he’s
understanding the situation we’re facing. At long last, we’ll be able to move
forward.”
Clarity Comes in a Letter
Even so, the meeting served as much to expose Cardinal Ratzinger’s inattention
to the problem as it did to showcase his new attitude.
Archbishop Wilson said in an interview that during the session he had to call
Vatican officials’ attention to long-ignored papal instructions, dating from
1922, and reissued in 1962, that gave Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Holy Office, sole responsibility
for deciding cases of priests accused of particularly heinous offenses:
solicitation of sex during confession, homosexuality, pedophilia and bestiality.
Archbishop Wilson said he had stumbled across the old instructions as a canon
law student in the early 1990s. And he eventually learned that canonists were
deeply divided on whether the old instructions or the 1983 canon law — which
were at odds on major points — should hold sway.
If the old instructions had prevailed, then there would be no cause for
confusion among bishops across the globe: all sexual abuse cases would fall
under Cardinal Ratzinger’s jurisdiction.
(The Vatican has recently insisted that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office was
responsible only for cases related to priests who solicited sex in the
confessional, but the 1922 instructions plainly gave his office jurisdiction
over sexual abuse cases involving “youths of either sex” that did not involve
violating the sacrament of confession.)
Few people in the room had any idea what Archbishop Wilson was talking about,
other participants recalled. But Archbishop Wilson said he had discussed the old
papal instructions with Cardinal Ratzinger’s office in the late 1990s and had
been told that they indeed were the prevailing law in pedophilia cases.
Just over a year later, in May 2001, John Paul issued a confidential apostolic
letter instructing that all cases of sexual abuse by priests were thenceforth to
be handled by Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. The letter was called “Sacramentorum
Sanctitatis Tutela,” Latin for “Safeguarding the Sanctity of the Sacraments.”
In an accompanying cover letter, Cardinal Ratzinger, who is said to have been
heavily involved in drafting the main document, wrote that the 1922 and 1962
instructions that gave his office authority over sexual abuse by priests cases
were “in force until now.”
The upshot of that phrase, experts say, is that Catholic bishops around the
world, who had been so confused for so long about what to do about molestation
cases, could and should have simply directed them to the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith all along.
Bishops and canon law experts said in interviews that they could only speculate
as to why the future pope had not made this clear many years earlier.
“It makes no sense to me that they were sitting on this document,” said the Rev.
John P. Beal, a canon law professor at the Catholic University of America. “Why
didn’t they just say, ‘Here are the norms. If you need a copy we’ll send them to
you?’ ”
Nicholas P. Cafardi, a Catholic expert in canon law who is dean emeritus and
professor of law at Duquesne University School of Law, said, “When it came to
handling child sexual abuse by priests, our legal system fell apart.”
There was additional confusion over the statute of limitations for sexual abuse
cases — or whether there even was one, given the Vatican’s reaffirmation of the
1922 and 1962 papal instructions. Many bishops had believed that they could not
prosecute cases against priests because they exceeded the five-year statute of
limitations enacted in 1983, effectively shielding many molesters since victims
of child abuse rarely came forward until they were well into adulthood.
Mr. Cafardi, who is also the author of “Before Dallas: The U.S. Bishops’
Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse of Children,” argued that another effect of the
2001 apostolic letter was to impose a 10-year statute of limitations on
pedophilia cases where, under a careful reading of canon law, none had
previously applied.
“When you think how much pain could’ve been prevented, if we only had a clear
understanding of our own law,” he said. “It really is a terrible irony. This did
not have to happen.”
Though the apostolic letter was praised for bringing clarity to the subject, it
also reaffirmed a requirement that such cases be handled with the utmost
confidentiality, under the “pontifical secret” — drawing criticism from many who
argued that the church remained unwilling to report abusers to civil law
enforcement.
Reforms, but Limited Reach
After the new procedures were adopted, Cardinal Ratzinger’s office became more
responsive to requests to discipline priests, said bishops who sought help from
his office. But when the sexual abuse scandal erupted again, in Boston in 2002,
it immediately became clear to American bishops that the new procedures were
inadequate.
Meeting in Dallas in the summer of 2002, the American bishops adopted a stronger
set of canonical norms requiring bishops to report all criminal allegations to
the secular authorities, and to permanently remove from ministry priests facing
even one credible accusation of abuse. They also sought from the Vatican a
streamlined way to discipline priests that would not require a drawn-out
canonical trial.
The Vatican initially rejected the American bishops’ proposed norms. A committee
of American bishops and Vatican officials, including Cardinal Ratzinger’s
deputy, watered down the American mandatory-reporting requirement to say only
that bishops must comply with civil laws on reporting crimes, which vary widely
from place to place.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reserved for itself the power to
dismiss a man from the priesthood without a full canonical trial — the kind of
administrative remedy that American bishops had long been begging the Vatican to
delegate to them.
Even so, the American bishops got most of what they asked for, and Cardinal
Ratzinger was their advocate, said Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory, then the
president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The Americans were allowed to keep their zero-tolerance provision for abusive
priests, making the rules for the church in the United States far more stringent
than in most of the rest of the world. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith also said it would waive the statute of limitations on a case-by-case
basis if bishops asked.
Archbishop Gregory said he made 13 trips to Rome in three years, almost always
meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger.
“He was extraordinarily supportive of what we were doing,” Archbishop Gregory
said in an interview.
Other reforms enacted by American bishops included requiring background checks
for church personnel working with children, improved screening of seminarians,
training in recognizing abuse, annual compliance audits in each diocese and lay
review boards to advise bishops on how to deal with abuse cases.
Those measures seem to be having an impact. Last year, according to the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 513 people made allegations of sexual
abuse against 346 priests or other church officials, roughly a third fewer cases
than in 2008.
Yet the Vatican did not proactively apply those policies to other countries, and
it is only now grappling with abuse problems elsewhere. Reports have surfaced of
bishops in Chile, Brazil, India and Italy who quietly kept accused priests in
ministry without informing local parishioners or prosecutors.
Benedict, now five years into his papacy, has yet to make clear if he intends to
demand of bishops throughout the world — and of his own Curia — that all priests
who committed abuse and bishops who abetted it must be punished.
As the crisis has mushroomed internationally this year, some cardinals in the
Vatican have continued to blame the news media and label the criticism
anti-Catholic persecution. Benedict himself has veered from defensiveness to
contrition, saying in March that the faithful should not be intimidated by “the
petty gossip of dominant opinion” — and then in May telling reporters that “the
greatest persecution of the church does not come from the enemies outside, but
is born from the sin in the church.”
The Vatican, moreover, has never made it mandatory for bishops around the world
to report molesters to the civil authorities, or to alert parishes and
communities where the abusive priests worked — information that often propels
more victims to step forward. (Vatican officials caution that a reporting
requirement could be dangerous in dictatorships and countries where the church
is already subject to persecution.)
It was only in April that the Vatican posted “guidelines” on its Web site saying
that church officials should comply with civil laws on reporting abuse. But
those are recommendations, not requirements.
Today, a debate is roiling the Vatican, pitting those who see the American
zero-tolerance norms as problematic because they lack due process for accused
priests, against those who want to change canon law to make it easier to
penalize and dismiss priests.
Where Benedict lies on this spectrum, even after nearly three decades of
handling abuse cases, is still an open question.
The arrogance of Cardinal Edward M. Egan is stunning. My thanks to The New York
Times for bringing the lawsuit that finally compelled the Roman Catholic Diocese
of Bridgeport to release documents relating to sexual abuse of children.
As a child growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York, I was sexually abused by a
priest. He was never punished by the church or by civil law. Like the other
little girls who were victims, I could not tell my mother. Priests, after all,
were next to God. My father would have killed him, so I couldn’t tell him
either. The Irish poor could hardly feed themselves, let alone bring a lawsuit.
The abusing priest lived to be 97 and was simply transferred from parish to
parish. I know this because an elderly cousin sent me his glowing obituary. I
couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.
The question, then, for Cardinal Egan is not how many priests actually do not
abuse children, but how many abusing priests have gotten away with it.
Eileen Adamec
Minneapolis, Dec. 7, 2009
•
To the Editor:
In “A Bishop’s Words,” you have pointed to the essence of the sexual abuse
problem in the Catholic Church, in that a bishop can obfuscate, cover up and
stonewall abuses going on in his diocese because it is part of the culture of
the hierarchy in the church, emanating right from the Vatican, where the pope
and the Curia know what goes on with their underlings.
As bishop of Bridgeport, Cardinal Edward M. Egan had the tacit approval of the
Vatican, where the culture is blind to any actions as long as it covers up
anything that might embarrass the institutional church. The prime example of
this is Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who in Boston was egregious in aiding and
abetting sexual abuse. And what happened to him? He was given a cushy job in
Rome.
Cardinal Egan is but one of many, but the heart of the problem lies in Rome.
Paul M. Hennessey
Wharton, N.J., Dec. 7, 2009
•
To the Editor:
There were clearly terrible mistakes made by the leadership of the Catholic
Church during the period of the abuse scandal. This should not be minimized in
any way. But please bear in mind that the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops instituted, in response, a series of vigorous controls to prevent this
from ever happening again, and the church will be better for this.
I would remind you at the same time, however, that during the course of this
terrible period, in excess of 95 percent of Catholic priests served their flocks
with holiness, honor and humility, and the world remained a much better place
because of these holy, dedicated men.
If you look hard enough, you will indeed find thousands upon thousands of
stories where lives and souls were saved by the dedicated, selfless service of
Catholic priests.
Michael J. Rogers
Rocky Hill, Conn., Dec. 7, 2009
•
To the Editor:
So Cardinal Edward M. Egan thinks that it’s “marvelous” how “very few [priests]
have even been accused” of sexual abuse and “how very few [cases] have even come
close to having anyone prove anything.” I wonder whether Cardinal Egan, whose
legal testimony as bishop of Bridgeport focused on deflecting accusations
against his clergy, and his fellow bishops have counted the cost of their years
of stonewalling, their attempts through church lawyers to discredit accusers,
and their strategy of hiding suspected abusers in plain sight by transferring
them from parish to parish.
The most obvious cost is to a generation of Catholics whose trust in their
church has been repaid by the discovery that that church for many years put its
own welfare above that of their children.
And there is the cost the church’s own teaching authority and its moral
authority have suffered by its persistent refusal to take responsibility for the
cover-up.
But a cost less remarked is to the reputation of parish priests, who became
unjustly suspect despite their blameless conduct because the bishops’ shell game
diffused the suspicion that should have been directed against the abusers alone
among the members of all the religious communities in which they continued to
live.
In seeking to whitewash the guilty, the bishops besmirched the innocent.
Thomas Leitch
Newark, Del., Dec. 7, 2009
•
To the Editor:
If someone were to make sexual abuse charges against an employee of The New York
Times, are we to expect that Times officials would not give the accused a fair
hearing? So why should a different standard apply to Cardinal Edward M. Egan,
who, when he was the bishop of Bridgeport, refused to throw his priests under
the bus as soon as accusations surfaced?
Of course, sexual abuse is indefensible. It is also indefensible for the leaders
of organizations to sell out their own on the basis of an accusation. It takes
courage to defend the rights of the accused, especially when the charges are
serious, and that’s why Cardinal Egan should be admired, not chastised.
William A. Donohue
President, Catholic League
for Religious and Civil Rights
New York, Dec. 7, 2009
In the end it was not the power of repentance or compassion that compelled
the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., to release more than 12,000
pages of documents relating to lawsuits alleging decades of sexual abuse of
children by its priests.
It was a court order. The diocese had spent seven years fighting a lawsuit
brought by The New York Times and three other newspapers to unseal the records
in 23 lawsuits involving accusations against seven priests. The diocese, which
settled those cases in 2002, was ready to battle all the way to the United
States Supreme Court to keep the archive secret. It lost in October, when the
justices declined to hear its appeal.
Much about those cases was known, and the documents do not greatly revise our
knowledge about the scandal that engulfed the entire church after erupting in
Boston in 2002. The accounts of priests preying on children, being moved among
parishes and shielded by their bishops while their accusers were ignored or
bullied into silence, are a familiar, awful story.
But still it is hard not to feel a chill reading the testimony from two
depositions given in 1997 and 1999 by Edward Egan, who was then bishop of
Bridgeport and later named a cardinal and archbishop of New York. As he
skirmishes with lawyers, he betrays a distressing tendency to disbelieve
accusers and to shuck off blame.
He responds to accounts of abuse not with shame but skepticism, and exhibits the
keen instinct for fraternal self-protection that reliably put shepherds ahead of
the traumatized flock.
Referring to the Rev. Raymond Pcolka, whom 12 former parishioners accused of
abuses involving oral and anal sex and beatings, Bishop Egan said: “I am not
aware of those things. I am aware of the claims of those things, the allegations
of those things. I am aware that there are a number of people who know one
another, some are related to one another, have the same lawyers and so forth.”
Absent in those pages is a sense of understanding of the true scope of the
tragedy. Compare Bishop Egan’s words with those of the archbishop of Dublin,
Diarmuid Martin, who, after the release of a recent report detailing years of
abuse and cover-ups in Ireland, said:
“The sexual abuse of a child is and always was a crime in civil law; it is and
always was a crime in canon law; it is and always was grievously sinful. One of
the most heartbreaking aspects of the report is that while church leaders —
bishops and religious superiors — failed, almost every parent who came to the
diocese to report abuse clearly understood the awfulness of what was involved.”
Bishop Egan, with institutional pride, looks at the relatively low rate of
proven abuse cases as a sort of perverse accomplishment.
“It’s marvelous,” he said, “when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of
priests and how very few have even been accused, and how very few have even come
close to having anyone prove anything.”
(Reuters) - Details of the recent sexual abuse scandals and related
developments affecting the U.S. Roman Catholic Church:
* 1984 - Abuse scandals in Louisiana begin to attract attention leading
freelance journalist Jason Berry to shed new light on the issue of cover-ups.
His 1992 book "Lead Us Not into Temptation" contends 400 priests and brothers
were involved in abuse cases during the previous eight years in North America.
* January 2002 - The Boston Globe reports 130 people were abused by former
priest John Geoghan during three decades where he was reassigned rather than
removed from contact with young boys. The Boston scandal starts to grow from
there.
* April 2002 - U.S. cardinals called to Rome to meet with Pope John Paul II on
the issue; in June 2002 the bishops approve plan for dealing with abuse, calling
for accused offenders to be removed from ministerial duties pending
investigation and evaluation.
* December 2002 - Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, the most senior Roman Catholic
official in the United States, resigns over his handling of clergy sexual abuse.
* September 2003 - The Boston Archdiocese agrees to pay up to $85 million to
settle lawsuits filed by hundreds of people who say they were sexually abused by
clergy.
* February 2004 - U.S. bishops issue report on abuse of children by priests over
52 years beginning in 1950. It finds 10,667 people accused priests of child
sexual abuse from 1950 through 2002, and more than 17 percent of the accusers
had siblings who were also allegedly abused.
* July-December 2004 - The dioceses of Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; and
Spokane, Washington, become the first to file for bankruptcy protection in the
face of growing abuse-related claims and suits.
* June 2005 - The Archdiocese of San Francisco and its insurance carriers
announce payment of $21 million to 15 people to settle lawsuits charging sexual
abuse.
* February 2006 - The Diocese of Covington, which covers a large area of
Kentucky, settles abuse claims for $85 million.
* July 2007 - The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agrees to pay $660 million to 500
victims of sexual abuse dating back as far as the 1940s in the largest
compensation deal of its kind.
* December 2007 - A lay body appointed to oversee efforts to end abuse says
nearly all dioceses have complied with an audit to make sure they have
protective measures in place; warns that "prevention, healing and vigilance will
be demanded for the rest of our days."
