LAFAYETTE (LA)
The Current [Lafayette LA]
August 19, 2026
By Reagan Charleston Thomas
Forty-four Catholic dioceses and religious orders across the country have sought bankruptcy protection since clergy sexual abuse claims began forcing the issue two decades ago. Two of them are in Louisiana, and a third may be next.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans filed for Chapter 11 in May 2020. The Diocese of Alexandria followed on Oct. 31, 2025, becoming the 41st U.S. diocese to take that route. Now the Diocese of Lafayette, already facing dozens of clergy abuse lawsuits, has enrolled a bankruptcy attorney in one of its pending cases, a move that often precedes a filing of its own. Whether or not Lafayette ultimately files, the pattern across the state is unmistakable: when survivors gain ground in court, dioceses reach for bankruptcy.
It is worth being precise about what that means for survivors. A Chapter 11 filing does not simply reorganize a diocese’s finances. It freezes every pending lawsuit against it. Discovery stops. Depositions stop. Trial dates disappear. Survivors who have waited years, sometimes decades, for a jury of their peers to hear their case are instead folded into a claims process with payouts set by formula rather than verdict.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans shows how long that process can take, even after a settlement is reached. More than five years passed between its May 2020 bankruptcy filing and a federal judge’s Dec. 8, 2025approval of a $230 million settlement for roughly 600 survivors. Even then, survivors were not paid on the spot. The Archdiocese’s own attorneys said it would take until the end of December just to get the money into a settlement trust, with individual payments to survivors following in early 2026, nearly six years after the case began. Five years is not a rounding error. It is half a decade in which survivors, many already in their sixties and seventies, waited for resolution while the institution that harmed them kept operating, kept raising money, and kept litigating.
Lafayette has not needed a bankruptcy filing to stall cases so far. For the past two years, I have watched the Diocese refuse to respond to discovery requests. I have watched it fight to force survivors to reveal their full legal names rather than proceed under pseudonym, and watched it raise procedural objections that have nothing to do with whether the abuse happened, and everything to do with running out the clock. Courts around the country allow child sexual abuse survivors to sue under pseudonym for good reason, to spare them the added trauma of public exposure. Fighting that protection case by case is not a legal necessity; it is intimidation dressed up as procedure. A bankruptcy filing would not end those tactics. It would formalize them, handing the diocese a single, court-supervised process to manage every claim at once, on its own timeline.
I represent survivors in cases among at least 50 lawsuits filed against the Diocese of Lafayette since June 2024, when the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the state’s lookback law and gave survivors until June 14, 2027 to sue regardless of when the abuse occurred. Every month spent fighting over discovery or a sealed name is a month closer to that deadline, for the survivors I represent and for those who have not yet come forward.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Every motion filed to stall discovery, every fight over a name on a sealed document, every bankruptcy attorney enrolled in a single case, is a choice. Louisiana’s dioceses can choose accountability, or they can continue choosing delay and hope survivors run out of time before the Church runs out of maneuvers. So far, the pattern speaks for itself.
Reagan Charleston Thomas is an attorney at Aylstock, Witkin, Kreis & Overholtz, representing survivors of clergy sexual abuse in lawsuits against the Diocese of Lafayette.