Thousands of pages of documents, millions of dollars in legal fees and dozens of contentious court hearings have finally brought the Archdiocese of New Orleans to the central questions of its four-year-old bankruptcy case: What compensation is due to people who were raped or molested by clergy decades ago? And how will the church come up with the money?
On Friday, in dueling legal filings, attorneys for the local Roman Catholic
church and the committee that represents nearly 550 survivors of clergy sex abuse laid out competing visions for how the nation’s second-oldest diocese should settle the claims against it.
Nearly $900 million separates the two sides. Under the archdiocese’s plan, people who have credible claims of sexual abuse by clergy would receive
$62.5 million, or roughly $114,000 each. The settlement plan proposed by court-appointed attorneys of abuse survivors called for a $994 million settlement, which would translate to…
View Cache