ALBANY (NY)
Times Union [Albany NY]
October 17, 2025
By Brendan J. Lyons
Payout heads off trial that would have focused on ex-Bishop Howard J. Hubbard’s coverup of allegations against priests who victimized children
ALBANY — The Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany has agreed to an $8 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by a man who had said he was molested hundreds of times as a child by a former high-ranking priest who ultimately admitted sexually abusing young boys for years.
The deal was finalized Thursday, four days before the religious organization’s cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests and others was expected to be laid bare in what would have been the diocese’s first trial as a defendant in a case filed under New York’s Child Victims Act.
The case is one of seven child sexual abuse lawsuits filed against the diocese that a federal judge in March ruled would be allowed to go to trial — part of an effort to spur mediation in the diocese’s languishing bankruptcy case.
That decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Littlefield Jr. came after attorneys for the hundreds of alleged victims with claims against the diocese had asserted that the settlement efforts had stalled, in part, because they needed trial verdicts to establish a more accurate picture of how much the victims should be compensated. The diocese’s insurance carriers have had a significant stake in those negotiations.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys said that several other cases, which were settled as the diocese threatened to file for bankruptcy more than two years ago, did not establish the benchmark needed to steer the mediation. Some of those plaintiffs, many of whom were aging or in poor health, had accepted reduced settlements out of fear they would otherwise get nothing.
The $8 million settlement agreed to this week by the diocese — without its insurance carriers involved in the negotiations — must be approved through the ongoing bankruptcy proceeding, but it also arms the attorneys and the alleged victims they represent with a clearer picture of the level of compensation they should expect to receive.
The trial that was set to begin Monday centers on a claim filed in March 2020 by Michael Harmon against the diocese as well as St. Catherine’s Center for Children and the Daughters of Charity Ministries, Inc. It is one of thousands of cases filed under the Child Victims Act, which temporarily lifted New York’s statute of limitations to allow people who were sexually assaulted as children to file civil claims against their alleged abusers or the institutions that harbored them.
Under the terms of the deal, the settlement agreement will be submitted to bankruptcy court for approval, and any money awarded by the judge will go into a trust fund for the benefit of all of the survivors who have filed similar claims against the Albany diocese. Harmon’s attorneys said that he supported that outcome: Because the diocese’s bankruptcy meant he was unlikely to receive all of the money personally, he wanted his case to be used to help the other alleged victims.
Harmon alleges he was sexually abused by Rev. Edward C. Pratt beginning when he was about 11 years old and in the custody of St. Catherine’s, an Albany group home for vulnerable children that was staffed by the Daughters of Charity. Pratt is a former vice chancellor for the diocese who was once then-Albany Bishop Howard J. Hubbard’s second-in-command.
In an October 2021 deposition, Pratt admitted to sexually abusing Harmon and other children, but claimed that in Harmon’s case, it only occurred after the boy had turned 16. Harmon’s attorneys have contended that assertion is false and that there is significant evidence that Pratt sexually abused Harmon when he was a young boy, as well as many other children.
Pratt, 81, had not been expected to testify at the trial due to failing health, but portions of his deposition would have been read into the record.
Former Albany Bishop Howard J. Hubbard admitted that he covered up allegations of child sexual abuse by priests to preserve “respect for the priesthood.” He also admitted, before he died in 2023, that many of the records documenting the sexual abuse allegations were kept in secret files that only he and other top church officials could access.
Court records
Hubbard, who died in 2023, was also accused of sexually abusing children — allegations he denied — and of systematically concealing alleged sexual abuse by other priests during his nearly four decades as bishop. That included his handling of the allegations against Pratt, who in 1999 was sent by Hubbard to a “sexual deviancy” treatment facility in Canada run by the Catholic Church.
And although officials at that treatment facility found that Pratt “still has issues with impulses to act out with youth,” he was allowed to return to his priesthood duties, albeit with a directive that his “ministry should be supervised and adult focused.”
It was not an unusual outcome for priests accused of sexual abuse — both within the Albany diocese and elsewhere.
Hubbard, who became bishop in 1977 and retired in 2014 at the age of 75, faced fierce criticism for his handling of sexual abuse allegations. That included shuffling priests accused of child sexual abuse in and out of treatment programs without alerting the public or their congregations. In some instances, priests who were returned to ministry went on to sexually abuse other children.
‘No legal recourse’
Court records indicate the diocese was planning to defend its handling of Pratt’s sexual abuse as appropriate under the standards they claim were in place at the time. They had retained Elizabeth L. Jeglic, a clinical psychologist from John Jay College, to testify as an expert witness in their defense.
Jeglic, according to court records, reviewed the handling of Pratt’s case and was expected to testify that Hubbard was not a mandated reporter of child abuse in 1999, when the late bishop claimed he first learned of Pratt’s alleged sexual abuse of Harmon and other children.
“Given that the abuse happened in the 1980s, and the victim was an adult at the time of the report, based upon subsequent correspondence with the district attorney’s office, even if the then-bishop had reported the allegations of abuse to the authorities, it is (sic) likely fell outside the statute of limitations and there likely could be no legal recourse,” Jeglic said in a sworn statement summarizing her opinion.
Jeglic also asserted that Pratt’s five months of treatment at the Southdown Institute, a church-run treatment center near Toronto, fell “within recommendations at the time for moderate and high-risk sex offenders.” She also explained in a pretrial filing that Pratt’s subsequent return to ministry, with purported supervision, had aligned with outcomes for convicted sex offenders after they were released from prison.
But in 2002, as more allegations of child sexual abuse surfaced against Pratt, he was finally removed from ministry by Hubbard.
Mallory C. Allen, an attorney for Harmon, said he was sexually abused by Pratt hundreds of times, and that church officials were aware of the abuse and took no action to stop it. Some of the abuse took place in Pratt’s living quarters at the diocese’s chancery in Albany, where he had a room across the hall from Hubbard, with whom he was very close.
In 1985, when Harmon was a teenager and had allegedly been enduring years of Pratt’s sexual abuse — sometimes involving other boys — he reported what was happening to Father Michael Farano, who was then chancellor of the diocese, according to the civil complaint. But instead of contacting police or investigating the allegations, Farano is accused of threatening Harmon if he told anyone else.
[PHOTO: Father Edward C. Pratt in a 2002 photo: In an October 2021 deposition, Pratt admitted to sexually abusing children during his decades as a priest in the Albany diocese. Now 81, he had not been expected to testify due to failing health. – FILE PHOTO/DG]
“I said, ‘Father Farano, I don’t know how to tell you this, but … Father Pratt has been, you know, touching me where, you know, in my private parts and I was touching him as well,’” Harmon testified during a pretrial deposition. “And then Father Farano said, ‘Enough is enough. Don’t tell me no more. I want you out of here. If I hear from you again, I’m going to call the cops.’”
The complaint alleges that Pratt was given unfettered access to Harmon and other children at St. Catherine’s, including taking them on unchaperoned trips and having them spend the night at his quarters in the chancery, where he is accused of sexually abusing them not only in his room but also in the common area of the facility.
The allegations that have emerged against Pratt include reports that he sexually abused children at St. Mary’s Academy, a regional Catholic school in the Glens Falls area, and at Holy Cross in Albany, where he abused an altar boy.
During his deposition, Pratt admitted to some of the misconduct, including at St. Mary’s in the 1970s, where he said he had boys remove their pants as he put them over his knee and spanked them. He claimed that had been the first time he had “inappropriate sexual contact with children.”
Allen, a partner in the law firm of Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala, is co-counsel in Harmon’s case with Cynthia S. LaFave, an Albany-area attorney whose firm, along with Jeff Anderson & Associates, represents 190 plaintiffs who have pending claims against the Albany diocese.
Those attorneys fought successfully to have the diocese turn over its highly guarded records on sexually abusive priests dating back decades — a court battle that reached the appellate courts. Allen, in a recent interview, said those records revealed exactly what they suspected: Church leaders “had significantly heightened knowledge over what the general public knew about child sexual abuse, the risk of it, and the fact that they had numerous clergy that were using their position to abuse kids.”
Following Thursday’s settlement, Allen said they “commend Michael’s bravery in coming forward, in standing up to the diocese, in uncovering the volume of what the diocese knew about its priests using their positions to sexually abuse children, and for his willingness to take his case to a jury trial for the benefit of all of the survivors in the Diocese of Albany.”
She added they are hopeful that the “diocese’s offer to settle this case on the eve of trial means that it — and even more importantly, its insurers — will step up and do what is right for the hundreds of others who were abused as children in this diocese and who are still waiting for justice.”
The diocese issued a statement on Friday afternoon saying the organization “does not dispute that abuse occurred and our offer to walk with survivors remains.”
“The diocese agreed to this settlement out of sensitivity for the impact a trial could have on the survivor and their family,” the statement continued. “If a survivor finds healing in sharing their story, it should be on their terms and not dictated via the testimony of a court process. We are sorry that anyone was abused at the hands of anyone, including someone they should have been able to trust in the church.”
‘Like a day camp’
The effectiveness of the treatment facilities where the Catholic church secretly sent priests like Pratt was also expected to be scrutinized during the trial that has now been canceled due to Thursday’s significant settlement.
In 1994, Hubbard sent Father Gary Mercure, one of the diocese’s most notorious sexual predators, to St. John Vianney, a church-run treatment center near Philadelphia. It was one of many facilities where priests who were admitted pedophiles or had broken their vows of celibacy underwent inpatient therapy. At the time, the church claimed that Mercure had been sent there due to a mental health breakdown, even though at the time, he had already been accused of sexually abusing a young man beginning when he was a teenager.
[PHOTO: Former Albany-area priest Gary Mercure in February 2011, during the trial that resulted in his conviction for raping young boys in the mid-1980s. In the mid-1990s, he was sent for months of treatment but then returned to priestly duties and allegedly continued abusing boys. He remains in prison in Massachusetts. (Skip Dickstein, Times Union archives)]
The devoutly Catholic parents of two boys who were sexually abused by Mercure in Warren County drove to Philadelphia to pick him up from the facility when he was being discharged, unaware that he had been sexually assaulting their boys for years. When they arrived to pick up Mercure, with one of their young sons along for the ride, they later learned that the former priest had allegedly tried to sexually abuse the child during that visit — after bringing him to his room under the pretext of gathering books.
Hubbard and other former top officials with the diocese subsequently claimed they did not receive a formal complaint against Mercure alleging sexual abuse of a minor until 2008, and that the diocese immediately referred the matter to law enforcement.
In 2011, the two boys from Warren County, who by then were adults, testified at Mercure’s criminal trial in Massachusetts, where he was convicted of raping other boys he drove across state lines from New York during skiing trips. The Massachusetts’ statute of limitations enabled prosecutors to bring rape charges against Mercure for his conduct — an investigation that began in Warren County under former District Attorney Kate Hogan. Mercure remains incarcerated in a state prison near Cape Cod.
Allen, whose law firm specializes in sexual abuse cases, said that the records they had obtained through pretrial discovery raise many questions about the treatment facilities where priests like Mercure and Pratt had been sent. She said that sometimes they would be evaluated by “actual physicians … but it’s like they read like a day camp, it’s like they have art class and hikes. … It sounds like a retreat … and then they just put them right back into rotation.”
But Allen said that the records also revealed instances in which priests who were accused of sexually abusing children “were not sent to treatment, and they just shuffled them around to keep it quiet.”
Court records indicate the attorneys for Harmon and another claimant with similar allegations conducted multiple settlement conferences with the diocese. They had also requested documentation from the diocese and its insurers on the scope of coverage and “whether the insurers will accept financial responsibility for paying damages awarded to plaintiffs against the diocese at trial.”
In an August motion seeking to compel the diocese to turn over that information, they wrote that their demands had been met with “stone silence.”
But as Monday’s trial date approached, the diocese, its insurers and the other defendants in the case agreed to the settlement with Harmon, which, if approved in the bankruptcy case, would mark the Albany diocese’s largest payout on record for an alleged victim of sexual abuse.
“This settlement, though certainly substantial, does not erase the trauma that Michael Harmon endured,” LaFave said. “Michael will live with this for all of his life. But Michael does know that this settlement brings out to the public this horrible abuse and the people who allowed it. For him, it is believing that children today will be more protected because he did this that matters the most.”
Brendan J. Lyons Managing Editor
Brendan J. Lyons is a managing editor for the Times Union overseeing the Capitol Bureau and investigations. Lyons joined the Times Union in 1998 as a crime reporter before being assigned to the investigations team. He became editor of the investigations team in 2013 and began overseeing the Capitol Bureau in 2017. You can reach him at blyons@timesunion.com or 518-454-5547.