The Leader of the Largest US Roman Catholic Archdiocese Apologized Sunday for What He Called a " Terrible Sin and Crime" As the Church Confirmed It Will Pay a Record $660 Mln to the Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse
Thanh Nien News
July 16, 2007
http://www.thanhniennews.com/worlds/?catid=9&newsid=30032
Los Angeles — Facing trial on Monday over abuse allegations dating as far back as the 1940s, the Archdiocese led by Cardinal Roger Mahony agreed to pay 508 victims the largest-ever group settlement.
"I have come to understand far more deeply that I ever could the impact of this terrible sin and crime that has affected their lives," said Mahony.
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| Plaintiff Carlos Perez-Carrillo speaks to reporters outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles |
"There really is no way to go back and give them that innocence that was taken from them," he said. "Once again, I apologize to anyone who has been offended, who has been abused. It should not have happened, and it will not happen again."
The settlement was the latest chapter in a clergy abuse scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, damaging its moral standing and forcing five U.S. diocese to seek bankruptcy protection.
Victims expressed a variety of emotions over the settlement.
"I have a mixed reaction," said Steve Sanchez, 47, one of 12 victims who had been scheduled to go to trial.
"There's a group of victims who have been fighting this publicly and ready to take on the church publicly, probably a handful...," he said. "At the same time there is a large group of victims who did not want to go through with the process, being in the public."
Sanchez, a financial planner, said he and his brother were abused by Los Angeles priest Clinton Hagenbach, who died in 1987.
Nurse Mary Ferrell, 59, who was abused as a girl starting in the late 1950s, said the payment will not ease all her suffering.
"I appreciate the size of it because I think it shows the culpability and guilt of the Catholic Church," she said. "It will change my life in that my life will become easier financially, but I don't think that it is going to cure all the pain and suffering."
Payments to victims and attorneys
Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the Los Angeles archdiocese, said Mahony would be in court on Monday as attorneys seek the judges' approval of the settlement.
Individual victims will receive between $100,000 and $4 million each, said plaintiff attorney Ray Boucher. A lawyer for the church said a third to half of settlements typically goes to plaintiffs' attorneys as compensation in contingency cases, although the lawyers declined to discuss their fees.
J. Michael Hennigan, attorney for the archdiocese, expects payments by the end of the year. The church will sell nonessential real estate assets, including the Los Angeles Archdiocese headquarters and perhaps some high schools, to raise the funds, he said.
Hennigan said the church would fund about $250 million of the $660 million settlement. The rest will come from insurers including Chubb, AIG Corp, Allianz and Fireman's Fund with whom the church holds general liability policies as well as several Catholic religious orders.
Mahony repeated on Sunday that vital properties and functions of the Church will not be impacted.
The Catholic Church, in which priests take a vow of celibacy, has faced abuse allegations worldwide over the past decade. Victims have alleged that church leaders often knew of the abuse but did not do enough to stop it.
Some US diocese have reached financial settlements with victims. The Archdiocese of Boston, where the U.S. scandal erupted in 2002, reached a 2003 deal for 550 people worth $85 million.
But victims have had special leverage in California because state legislators authorized an exception to the statute of limitations for old abuse complaints.
The Los Angeles cases have cast a spotlight on Mahony, one of the most prominent U.S. Catholic leaders. Victims allege he did not deal properly with complaints against priests of abuse, and the settlement spares him difficult questions in court.
"Cardinal Mahony and other church leaders would have had to take the witness stand under oath and tell the truth about how much they knew and how little they did with that knowledge to protect the children," said Barbara Blaine, founder of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
"What we would have seen is the horrors with the reality that hundreds of children were sexually assaulted, raped, sodomized by priests when the leadership of the church knew."
If the archdiocese keeps to its schedule, all payments will be made ahead of a 2008 trip by Pope Benedict to the United States announced on Sunday.
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