PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
February 6, 2020
By Maria Panaritis
At first, the number seems huge: The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has paid out nearly $39 million to 181 sexual-abuse victims through the compensation fund it opened last year.
Wow, you might think to yourself. Finally, the institution whose leaders allowed generations of children to be destroyed by the sexual depravity of countless priests while bishops and monsignors helped cover it up, is paying up from the treasury it so immorally had fought to protect.
But don’t be fooled. This is a mammoth number only when you consider how difficult victims have found securing just compensation in one of the nation’s largest Catholic dioceses thanks to resistance by the church itself.
Accountability has arrived, yes. But at discount rates.
The $39 million tally, provided to me this week about the clergy-abuse compensation fund created after the 2018 grand jury report into Catholic clergy abuse in Pennsylvania, is well below what the five-county archdiocese would likely have paid in court — if it had not helped block a state law that would have allowed a flood of lawsuits.
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