$55M offered to settle priest cases
By Elizabeth Mehren
Los Angeles Times
BOSTON — The Boston Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church yesterday offered $55 million to settle more than 500 sexual-abuse lawsuits, according to lawyers involved in the case.
The possible conclusion to about 540 civil claims pending against the church here comes barely a week after the installation of a new archbishop. Sean Patrick O'Malley pledged in his investiture homily to help resolve the abuse crisis that has rocked the United States' fourth-largest archdiocese for more than a year and a half.
With talks between victims and the church stalled for months, O'Malley immediately appointed a new lawyer, Thomas Hannigan, who previously helped O'Malley settle sexual abuse claims against the diocese of Fall River, Mass.
The proposal represents "a positive step in the right direction, but is certainly not the end of the journey," said Mitchell Garabedian, who represents 120 men and women who say they were molested as children by priests.
The Rev. Christopher Coyne, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said he was not in a position to discuss ongoing settlement negotiations.
According to a copy of the settlement proposal, each plaintiff will have 30 days in which to accept the offer. The settlement will not take effect unless 95 percent of the claimants accept it.
Money is to be allocated according to criteria to be determined by the victims, their lawyers and mediators, "based on the type and severity of abuse and damage sustained by each claimant," the offer states. The archdiocese would not participate in the allocation process.
The offer comes on the heels of a report last month by Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly that estimated more than 1,000 children were abused by 250 Boston priests and church officers over six decades.
Reilly said he was unable to bring criminal charges against church leaders because of statutes of limitation and because laws at the time of the abuse were inadequate.
But Reilly said Cardinal Bernard Law, who left his post as head of the Boston Archdiocese in disgrace in December, and other church leaders here were ultimately responsible for the mistreatment of children by priests. Law and others in the archdiocese have admitted to reassigning pedophile priests to jobs in which they would continue to have contact with children.
"The attorney general's report was a very significant development, combined with the fact that Bishop O'Malley came in with an understanding and a mandate that these claims had to be solved without long-term, scorched-earth litigation," said attorney Jeffrey Newman, whose law firm represents more than 200 alleged clerical abuse victims.
