By Daniel Payne
CNA Staff, Sep 27, 2024 / 13:20 pm
The Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York this week announced it has reached a massive settlement of more than $300 million for victims of clerical sex abuse there, bringing an end to a four-year-long process that included an earlier offer that the abuse survivors had rejected.
The diocese said in a press release on Thursday that the total proposed settlement amount “is just over $323 million, which includes insurance contributions, diocesan assets, and sale proceeds from diocesan property, and contributions from parishes and other related entities.”
The amount represents the largest settlement in U.S. diocesan bankruptcy history. It will be distributed to about 600 abuse survivors.
“The diocese, parishes, and other related entities will contribute a total of $234.8 million,” the statement said. “Insurance companies will contribute a total of just over $85 million. Counsel for the creditor’s committee will contribute $3 million.”
The contributors to the settlement “all participated in order to help offer equitable compensation to survivors and move this difficult ordeal toward a conclusion,” the statement said.
The diocese filed for bankruptcy in October 2020 following the passage of the state’s Child Victims Act in 2019. That measure allowed for sex abuse lawsuits to be filed in past cases where survivors had not yet taken action, long after the statute of limitations had expired.
Rockville Centre had last year made a $200 million settlement offer to diocesan abuse victims, though the survivors ultimately rejected that offer.
Richard Tollner, chairman of the Diocese of Rockville Centre Unsecured Creditors Committee, told media this week that the settlement was “a victory that took a long time.”
“[To] a majority of [survivors] it’s a little bit of relief. [For] a few of them it’s a surrender, but a majority of them are like, ‘It’s time,'” he said.
Adam Slater, an attorney whose law firm Slater Slater Schulman LLP represented dozens of abuse victims in the suit, said in a statement to CNA on Friday that “the majority of our clients are in their 60s and 70s — they have been waiting decades for justice, and we are extremely pleased to reach this settlement on their behalf.”
“We hope it will serve as a model for other pending cases around the country so that adult survivors living with the lifelong trauma of being sexually assaulted by predator-priests can receive the compensation they deserve and begin healing,” Slater said.
The lawyer noted that the decision was “the first diocese settlement to be reached nationwide following the Supreme Court’s recent Purdue Pharma decision.”
That June 27 ruling from the Supreme Court will likely have a significant effect on U.S. Church abuse lawsuits. The court ruled that U.S. bankruptcy law does not allow for a “discharge [of] claims against a non-debtor without the consent of affected claimants” in Chapter 11 proceedings. The order potentially opens up individual Catholic parishes and schools to legal action from abuse victims.
The Rockville Centre Diocese said this week that its “goal has always been the equitable compensation of survivors of abuse while allowing the Church to continue her essential mission.”
“We believe that this plan will achieve those goals,” it said.
Rockville Centre is one of more than two dozen U.S. dioceses that have declared bankruptcy amid voluminous sexual abuse lawsuits, with numerous dioceses having reached multimillion-dollar settlements with victims in recent years.
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