Record church payout caps series of child abuse scandals

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The 660 million dollar pay-out agreed Monday for people sexually abused by clergy of the Roman Catholic in Los Angeles wrapped up just one in a damaging and ruinously expensive stream of abuse claims against priests in the United States.

More than 500 victims were granted compensation under the Los Angeles deal for claims of abuse spanning decades -- but thousands more people have filed abuse complaints against the church in recent years, eroding its finances as well as its reputation.

Some 3,000 individual priests have been the subject of complaints of abusing mostly children linked to their parishes, according to the organization "Bishop Accountability" which archives such cases in the United States.

At the time, the victims stayed largely silent. The rare complaints were hushed up, and priests implicated in abuse were discreetly shunted around from parish to parish.

The flood gates opened in 2002 when the then-archbishop of Boston Bernard Law admitted covering up to protect a priest who he knew to be guilty of sexual abuse.

The shock case triggered a landslide of testimony, some dating to the 1940s, with most reports of abuse between the 1960s and 1980s.

US bishops responded by launching a large-scale reform of their church, trying to help victims and training millions of their own personnel to prevent abuse.

The testimonies eased as a result, to just over 700 in 2006, most of them for long-ago offenses. But the financial damage has not let up.
The American Catholic Church has so far paid out more than two billion dollars to victims.

Since the Boston scandal, the church's insurance has absorbed some of the cost of compensating those who were abused, but it has also had to sell off property.

Dioceses across the nation -- from Miami to Washington state, California to Boston, have paid out hundreds of millions in compensation. At least five have gone bankrupt paying civil penalties.

The Boston case cost that archdiocese more than 150 million dollars. It had to sell the grand building housing its historic headquarters and several smaller properties.

The Los Angeles church -- the largest archdiocese in a nation of some 69 million Catholic worshippers -- is expected to sell off assets from its estimated four billion dollar real estate holdings to help pay for the latest settlement. The victims will get around 1.3 million dollars each on average.

The diocese of San Diego in southern California, bankrupted by compensation claims, has offered 95 million dollars for victims to settle 150 charges of abuse.

In December the Los Angeles archdiocese agreed to hand 60 million dollars to 46 other victims, who also successfully campaigned for files on the accused priests to be made public.

But Monday's settlement headed off the prospect of a potentially explosive civil trial.

Ray Boucher, the lead lawyer for the victims, said the settlement also provided for the release of previously confidential personnel files of priests, which would shed light on what church leaders knew about the abuse and when they knew it.

Several priests have already been convicted, some of them for abusing dozens of children. But some victims are aiming higher, seeking to make the rich Catholic Church itself accountable.

In January, a US federal judge confirmed a complaint brought by three people demanding compensation from the Vatican. They accuse it of encouraging clergy to cover up sex abuse scandals.