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  Defense Lawyers Blamed in Church Crisis
Attorney Says Bishops Followed Bad Legal Advice on Abuse Claims

By Tom Beyerlein
Dayton Daily News [Dayton OH]
January 10, 2005

An attorney who represented the Catholic church in 500 clergy sexual abuse cases from 1987-95 says many fellow defense lawyers have fanned the flames of the priest child sex-abuse crisis by playing hardball with victims and advising bishops to remain silent in the face of victims' pain."I think lawyers contributed significantly in turning the problem into a crisis, making something that could have been handled by the church into something that is now going to haunt the church for decades to come," Minneapolis law professor Patrick Schiltz said.

Schiltz is to discuss lawyer mishandling of the scandal at the University of Dayton tonight as part of UD's Wounded Body of Christ lecture series. The free program begins at 7 p.m. in the Sears Recital Hall in Jesse Philips Humanities Center. It's open to the public.

Too Much Law, Too Little Justice is the theme of Schiltz's discussion. He is a professor at St. Thomas More School of Law.

UD announced Friday that the Rev. Robert Schreiter, an expert on reconciliation from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, will explore Is Reconciliation Possible? at the next installment of the series, set for 7 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Kennedy Union ballroom.

Schiltz said the effect of the scandal on the church would have been blunted had attorneys shown more compassion for victims in the first place and not tried to represent the Catholic church as if it were a corporation.

Schiltz said many attorneys "either acted badly or gave bad advice," intimidating victims into making settlements and instructing bishops not to meet with victims or make public statements about the crisis to avoid admitting liability.

Bishops gave their attorneys a major role in handling the scandal "when the litigation really exploded" in the mid-1980s to early 1990s, but many lawyers dealt with it "as a legal problem (without) seeing the nonlegal dimensions," Schiltz said.

Many lawsuits were headed off or settled, and church officials were largely successful in stopping new cases of child abuse, but victims of past abuse still felt that justice hadn't been done.

"They (church officials and attorneys) never dealt with the justice deficit," he said. "There was still a big debt to be paid, and I don't mean money. That led to the second wave" of abuse revelations and lawsuits in the past several years.

Settlement amounts have skyrocketed, forcing three U.S. dioceses to file for bankruptcy.

Schiltz said some bishops have taken empathetic stands on the scandal despite pressure to stand mute from defense attorneys and insurers.

Other bishops share in the blame.

"I don't think you can blame (the crisis) on attorneys," he said. "Obviously, the ones who are to blame are the abusive priests and the negligent bishops. Bishops who essentially turned their dioceses over to lawyers were wrong. (But) when you're a bishop and you're looking down the barrel of a $100 million lawsuit, you've got to pause before scotching the advice of your attorney."

Schiltz said bishops should establish out-of-court victim compensation systems whereby victims tell their stories to a neutral review board, the board sets the amount of compensation in each case and the church pays it.

Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk established a review board and $3 million compensation fund as part of a plea bargain with the Hamilton County prosecutor's office that involved Pilarczyk pleading no contest on behalf of the archdiocese as an entity to misdemeanor criminal charges.

To take part in the fund, victims had to agree to forfeit their right to sue the archdiocese.

Schiltz said that's similar to the solution he proposes, except the Cincinnati fund has a limited amount of money and that "it sounds like it's been done to get rid of a criminal case. It sounds like (Pilarczyk) did it with a gun to his head."

 
 

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