NEW YORK (NY)
New York Post
January 14, 2021
By Tamar Lapin
The Archdiocese of New York may have been motivated to start its own compensation program for victims of child sex abuse as a way to keep lawmakers from passing the Child Victims Act, a report claimed Thursday.
New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan had apparently hoped that the payments to victims would remain in-house — and “worried” about the landmark legislation, ABC News reported.
The archdiocese established its independent compensation program in 2016 “to bring a sense of healing, resolution and compensation to victim-survivors,” it said at the time.
But a transcript of a confidential Dec. 2017 call obtained by ABC implies the key reason Dolan “decided to bite the bullet and create a program” was because of the “movement afoot in Albany” over the Child Victims Act.
The claims were made by Kenneth Feinberg, a mediator hired by Dolan to administer the archdiocese’s Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, during a teleconference with reps of three Upstate New York dioceses, the report said.
“I think the Cardinal feels that it is providing his lawyers in Albany with additional persuasive powers not to reopen the statute,” Feinberg said of the program.
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