KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star
By JUDY L. THOMAS
jthomas@kcstar.com
The Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese paid more than $3 million in legal fees on sexual abuse cases in the past fiscal year, raising the total litigation costs to more than $10 million since one of its priests was charged with producing child pornography four years ago.
The figures, published in a diocesan report covering the year ending June 30, 2014, don’t include legal costs incurred after that date associated with a $9.95 million settlement in October involving 32 victims, some of whom alleged abuse going back several decades. The diocese said last week that those numbers weren’t yet available.
Even without those figures, the diocese has paid more than $27 million in settlements and litigation costs related to priest sex abuse cases in the past four years.
A recent report released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops shows that the Kansas City diocese isn’t alone. Since 2004, the Catholic Church nationwide has paid nearly $3 billion in costs related to the sex abuse scandal, according to an annual survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
In fiscal 2014, dioceses and religious orders spent $119 million on settlements to victims, therapy and attorneys’ fees, the survey found.
More than half of those payments — 53 percent — were settlements to victims, with legal fees accounting for an additional 24 percent. The remainder went toward support for offenders and therapy for victims and offenders.
The church also spent nearly $32 million on safe environment training programs, background checks and other protective efforts.
The survey was included in an annual audit of how dioceses are complying with the requirements that U.S. bishops established in their 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
The survey found that the number of priest sex abuse cases in the church continues to decrease. More than 80 percent of the 294 credible allegations of abuse reported in the past fiscal year dated back more than 25 years, with most occurring from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Though the report showed positive progress, “we must remain ever vigilant in the protection of children,” Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a news release last month.
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