Erie diocese facing lawsuit over fund for abuse victims

By Ed Palattella
GoErie.com
July 17, 2020

https://www.goerie.com/news/20200717/erie-diocese-facing-lawsuit-over-fund-for-abuse-victims

Filing of writ signals suit in Erie County Court. Claims linked to St. Hedwig Catholic Church and its long-closed school.

The Catholic Diocese of Erie is the subject of a potential lawsuit over its victims’ compensation fund, a program the diocese created as an alternative to allowing victims to sue over clergy sexual abuse.

Two anonymous plaintiffs have filed paperwork indicating they plan to file a full-blown suit against the diocese in Erie County Court.

Their lawyer told the Erie Times-News that the full details will come out in later filings, but that the plaintiffs are suing because the diocese denied the claims they submitted to the compensation fund, created in 2019.

“The diocese would not offer them anything on the matter,” the lawyer, Bernard Tully, of Pittsburgh, said on Friday. “They voluntarily participated in the program and were not offered anything.”

The defendants, according to court records, are the Catholic Diocese of Erie and current Bishop Lawrence Persico; former Bishop Alfred Watson, who died in 1990 and served as bishop from 1969 to 1982; former Bishop Michael Murphy, who died in 2007 and served as bishop from 1982 to 1990; and St. Hedwig Catholic Church, 521 E. Third St. in Erie, and the parish’s former grade school, which closed in 1984.

Persico’s immediate predecessor as bishop of Erie, Donald W. Trautman, who retired in 2012 and continues to reside in Erie, is not named as a defendant.

The plaintiffs, listed only as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, on Wednesday filed what is known as a praecipe for a writ of summons in Erie County Court. The writ provides no details of the pending litigation, though a cover sheet filed with the writ lists “sexual abuse” as the nature of the action.

A writ of summons typically signals that a civil complaint is on its way. Plaintiffs often file writs to meet the deadline for the statute of limitations for filing a suit or to start the evidence-gathering process, known as discovery, in a civil case.

Tully declined to provide details about what would be in the full complaint.

“That will all come out through the process,” he said.

The Catholic Diocese of Erie said it had not been served with the writ as of Friday and declined to comment.

The Catholic Diocese of Erie opened the claims process for its fund for victims, called the Independent Survivors’ Reparation Program, in February 2019, and the diocese since then has paid out about $6 million in claims to at least 50 victims or survivors, according to the diocese.

The outside administrator handling the claims is the firm of Ken Feinberg, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer and expert on compensation funds. Feinberg handled the compensation fund for 9/11 victims. Feinberg and his firm evaluate the claims for the diocese without Persico’s involvement, the bishop has said.

The six-month period for filing claims with the Erie diocese’s compensation fund ended in August. The diocese in March suspended payments from the fund due to the decline in the stock market because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Persico has pledged that the diocese will resume making payments and close out about 40 unresolved cases once the market recovers.

The Erie diocese has not disclosed how much money it has available for its fund, though Persico has said the diocese is covering the payouts and related expenses using budget surpluses and income from investments rather than giving at the parish level.

The Catholic Diocese of Erie joined a number of the state’s other Roman Catholic dioceses in creating separate compensation funds in response to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s call for the General Assembly to amend the civil statute of limitations to create a two-year window to allow for the immediate filing of suits over old incidents of abuse. Other states, such as New York, have passed such legislation.

Shapiro advocated for the changes following his office’s release, in August 2018, of the 884-page grand jury report that detailed allegations of child sexual abuse against 301 “predator priests” in the Roman Catholic Church across Pennsylvania, including the 13-county Catholic Diocese of Erie, over the past 70 years. The grand jury recommended the creation of a two-year window.

The GOP-controlled state House and Senate failed to pass the immediate two-year window, which Pennsylvania’s Catholic dioceses opposed. Lawmakers instead started the process for the passage of a constitutional amendment to allow for the two-year window sometime in the years ahead.

The amendment process will take years and is not guaranteed to succeed. The bill on the amendment must pass the state House and Senate again in the 2021-22 legislative session before it could appear on the ballot for voters to consider.

The Senate’s top Republican, President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, of Jefferson County, backed the statewide church-created funds to compensate victims and had argued that retroactively restoring the rights of someone to sue would be unconstitutional.

In light of the grand jury report, the General Assembly in 2019 eliminated time limits in future criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse, which had gone up to a victim’s age of 50. Lawmakers also raised the time limit, from the victim’s age of 30 to 55, for a future victim to sue.

But lawmakers refused to create an immediate two-year window to sue in old cases, leaving the compensation funds as the likeliest way for victims to get money in cases that went beyond the statute of limitations.

Victims who get compensated through the funds must agree not to sue, even if the constitutional amendment passes for a two-year window.

A successful lawsuit could lead to a larger judgment or settlement than the offerings of the compensation funds, which the dioceses control. But applying for money from the compensation fund also removes the risk of waiting on a constitutional amendment to pass.

In the case of John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, one of the Catholic Diocese of Erie’s defenses would appear to be that, without a constitutional amendment, the plaintiffs cannot sue over old allegations of clergy sex abuse, despite the grand jury report and its recommendations.

The report mentions several incidents connected to St. Hedwig Catholic Church, but whether they are related to the writ of John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 is unclear because of the writ’s lack of details.

St. Hedwig Church was established in 1911 and merged with other Catholic churches in the city of Erie in 2016, 32 years after the grade school at St. Hedwig closed because of declining enrollment. The writ’s reference to the long-closed school indicates the claims are old.