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L.A. Archdiocese reaches agreement with more than 500 abuse claimants, By Catholic News Service

LOS ANGELES (CNS) -- The Los Angeles Archdiocese July 15 announced the largest church settlement of sexual abuse lawsuits to date, agreeing to pay more than 500 alleged victims a total of $660 million.

Before noon the next day, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Haley Fromholz had approved the settlement, calling it "the right result." He said settling the cases was "the right thing to do."

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony again offered his personal apology to every victim of sexual abuse by a priest, religious, deacon or layperson in the archdiocese.

"It is the shared hope of everyone in our local church that these victims, many of whom suffered in silence for decades, may find a measure of healing and some sense of closure with today's announcement," he said in a statement July 15.

"Although financial compensation in itself is inadequate to make up for the harm done to the victims and their families, still this compensation does provide a meaningful outreach to assist the victims to rebuild their lives and to move forward," he said.

The settlement -- reached by attorneys for the archdiocese and 508 people suing the archdiocese -- came the weekend before the first of 15 civil trials in Los Angeles County courts was to begin July 16. With the agreement in hand, Cardinal Mahony and attorneys for both sides instead appeared in court to present the formal settlement to Fromholz for approval.

Following Fromholz's action, Cardinal Mahony repeated his apology and his offer to meet privately with any victim of abuse who asks. "This particular day is a day for the victims to speak," he said, adding that he would spend the rest of the day in prayer.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, said July 17 that the settlement "understandably has garnered great attention both because of the number of cases involved as well as for the figure of the settlement."

"But, as Cardinal Mahony -- in line with what John Paul II and Benedict XVI said many times -- the church obviously is pained mainly by the suffering of the victims and their families because of the profound wounds caused by the serious and inexcusable behavior of some of its members," Father Lombardi said.

He said the settlement agreement, "with the sacrifices it requires," is also a sign of the seriousness with which the church "has committed itself to doing everything possible to avoid a repetition of such wicked acts."

During the hearing, Ray Boucher, lead attorney for the victims, thanked his clients for their resolve and courage, asking them to stand. "I think they deserve a tremendous debt of gratitude," Boucher said, fighting back tears.

He credited Cardinal Mahony with taking steps that led to the settlement, which might not have occurred "if left to the lawyers."

Michael Hennigan, attorney for the archdiocese, said in the courtroom that his views of clergy sex abuse had changed over the years he spent on the cases, largely through his private meetings with 70 plaintiffs.

"I'd like to say that the church would have been reformed without these cases, but I don't know that's true," he said. "These cases have forever reformed the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. It will never be the same."

Margaret Graf, general counsel for the archdiocese, thanked county courts personnel for their role in helping to bring about a settlement through mediation.

"This was the courts at their best," said Graf. "We appreciate the enormous efforts of our Superior Courts in Los Angeles to deal with this very complex and sensitive litigation and the fact that they made the resources of the courts available."

She thanked in particular Judges Charles McCoy, Peter Lichtman and Fromholz, as well as the hundreds of attorneys and other legal professionals who represented the defendants and the victims.

In addition to the monetary settlement, the Los Angeles Archdiocese tried to facilitate a pastoral response toward the victims of clergy sexual abuse when possible.

For more than a year, Cardinal Mahony has been meeting with victims and their families individually, and hopes to continue meeting with victims, said Graf. The cardinal has met with more than 70 victims. McCoy, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge participated in most of the meetings -- sometimes lasting as along as three hours.

"Judge McCoy facilitated it so that there could be pastoral outreach and victims could tell the cardinal their story in a noncourt environment," she said.

The archdiocese also has been paying for therapy and counseling for victims, regardless of whether they are involved in litigation, said Graf.

Last December, the archdiocese announced the settlement of 45 lawsuits for $60 million.

Under the latest agreement, the archdiocese will pay $250 million and the balance will come from a combination of payments from insurance carriers and religious orders whose members have been accused in the abuse cases.

According to a tally prepared by the Los Angeles Times, the previous largest settlement of abuse cases in the United States since 2002 was the $157 million the Boston Archdiocese agreed to pay to 983 claimants in several different settlement agreements. The Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., agreed to pay $129 million to 315 claimants; the Diocese of Orange, Calif., agreed to pay $100 million to 90 claimants, and the Diocese of Covington, Ky., settled with 350 claimants for $85 million.

Cardinal Mahony said the new settlement and the one for $60 million announced in November "will have very serious and painful consequences for the archdiocese." He said the archdiocese will re-evaluate all ministries and services, "since we will not be able to offer them at the same levels as in the past."

The archdiocese will sell "nonessential properties" to fund its portion of the settlement, he said, adding that no parish properties or schools would be affected.

In May Cardinal Mahony said the archdiocese would sell its chancery building to help finance the settlements. Archdiocesan functions would either move to rented space elsewhere or the archdiocese would lease back space in its current building, he said.

About 50 properties had been identified as available to sell to cover the settlement costs.

Teresa Kettelkamp, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Office of Child and Youth Protection, told Catholic News Service that the Los Angeles settlement is a watershed for the number of victims it includes. She said she hopes the settlement is the key to enabling the victims to achieve greater healing.

Reaching a court settlement for damages "is just one of the tools of healing," she said. "Hopefully time will tell whether it makes a difference."

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Contributing to this story were Cindy Wooden in Rome and Ellie Hidalgo in Los Angeles.

Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal Nears Pope.

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Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal Nears Pope.

Pope Benedict XVI uses a handkerchief during a canonization ceremony at the Vatican, Oct. 11, 2009.  (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

(CBS)  A papal letter of apology is the latest effort to save the Catholic Church from a scandal that threatens to become a plague of Biblical proportions. 

Even Pope Benedict XVI has admitted that the Church has been "severely shaken" by repeated allegations of high-level cover-ups of sexual abuse and demands for a clear apology. 

"My hope is that it (the letter) will help in the process of repentance, healing and renewal," the pontiff said earlier this week. 

The letter will be released on Saturday, but CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reports that it's unlikely to assuage the anger of victims in parishes from the U.S. to Ireland., the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Brazil. 

"I don’t think a pastoral letter is the proper context in which to respond to a report about the cover up the rape of children," said Andrew Madden, an abuse victim. 

Government-ordered inquiries in Ireland have documented cases of abuse and cover-ups between the 1930s and 1990s that involved more than 15,000 children. 

"Children were sworn to secrecy, having made allegations against a priest, and subsequently that priest was allowed to carry on being a priest," said Madden. 

In fact, the practice of protecting offending priests at the expense of the victims reportedly involved the Pope himself. When he was an archbishop in Germany, at least one known offender was moved from one parish to another. 

A Germany psychiatrist told the New York Times in a story published Friday that he repeatedly warned the diocese Benedict then headed about the priest in question. 

"I said, 'For God's sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,'" the psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, told the Times in a phone interview from Munich. "I was very unhappy about the entire story." 

His alleged warnings, which were repeated to Benedict's senior aids, went unheeded. 

German bishops have now recommended what they termed, "a compulsory registration of suspected sexual and physical abuse cases to state prosecutors." 

"I don't want to blame the Pope," Archbishop Reinhard Marx said in Germany. "We as bishops have the responsibility in our dioceses." 

Be that as it may, what really matters now is how far the Pope will go towards righting a massive wrong that just seems to keep on growing. 

Confusion reigns as Belgium struggles with Catholic sex abuse scandal By Robert Marquand

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Cardinal urged Catholic sex abuse victim to keep quiet, new tapes reveal, A conversation published this weekend by Belgian media provides a rare glimpse into a transaction between church officials and victims involved in Catholic sex abuse scandals.

Paris

A former Belgian church leader privately urged a victim of sexual abuse to remain silent this past spring, at a time when the Vatican was denying the scope and scale of a pedophile scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church to its core.

The April 8 conversation, captured on tapes published this weekend and confirmed by church authorities as genuine, offers a rare glimpse into a transaction between church officials and victims in what has been described as a widespread practice of hushing pedophile cases.

Cardinal Godfried Danneels is heard telling the victim, a nephew of Bishop Robert Vangheluwe, “The bishop will resign next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait… I don’t think you would do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.”

Taped April 8 meeting

The tapes came from an April 8 meeting between Cardinal Danneels, Bishop Vangheluwe, and the unidentified victim to discuss how to proceed in an instance of sexual abuse the victim had long tried to report. The case was long ignored until media organizations in Ireland and Germany, as well as The New York Times, revealed a broad pattern of pedophilia by priests that went well beyond Catholic clergy in the United States.

In the taped conversation, published Saturday by the Belgian dailies Het Nieuwsblad and De Standaard, the victim asks for help in reporting the case. But Danneels – the former archbishop of Brussels who ordained Vangheluwe as bishop of Bruges in December 1984 but left his post in January – says he is not in a position to report the case to church authorities or Pope Benedict.

Danneels asked the victim to accept a private apology from Vangheluwe and not "drag his name through the mud" – at least until the bishop retired, which he was expected to do in the coming year. The victim replied, “He [Vangheluwe] has dragged my whole life through the mud, from 5 until 18 years old… Why do you feel sorry for him and not for me?”

Vangheluwe resigned on April 23, admitting that he had illicit relations with a “boy in my close entourage.”

The resignation followed a threatening e-mail to Belgian bishops from someone close to the nephew, calling for Vangheluwe to step down or risk exposure of his misdeeds.

The bishop’s resignation, which came two weeks after the April 8 meeting and two days after Pope Benedict XVI vowed action on sexual abuse of children by priests, followed weeks of a Vatican campaign to downplay the Catholic sex abuse scandal and to attack news organizations for exaggerating pedophilia claims. Pope Benedict later asked forgiveness for the church.

In an April 19 address to a Belgian college, Vangheluwe stated, "I think you need to be well informed about these things... Yes it [pedophilia] is embarrassing... but there have been articles implying that pedophilia is nowhere so little prevalent than in the church," he said, according to a report in De Standaard.

In an April 21 edition of Church and Life, a Flemish Catholic monthly, the bishop writes that "everywhere there are stories of priests abusing children. It is horrible to see these things surface and they hurt us deeply. This shouldn't blind us from the fact that the majority of priests lead exemplary lives."

Why nephew released tapes

Media outlets in Belgium and Luxembourg, citing church sources, have reported that the victim has received monetary compensation for years from the bishop; the victim has said he released the tapes to show that he hadn’t attempted to blackmail his uncle.

The New York Times reported this summer that the victim's family was angered that Danneels, rather than the new archbishop of Brussels, Andre-Joseph Leonard, met in April to discuss the case.

The Times also reported that a retired Belgian priest, Rev. Rik Deville, said he had earlier tried to make the the victim’s case known to church authorities, but was “berated for doing so.”

The bishop’s resignation and admission set off a chain of events in Belgium that led to hundreds of people coming forward to report abuse to an official commission. It was also followed by Belgian police raids on a bishops meeting and on Danneels' home.

The Belgian daily Le Soir reported in August that a significant number of Catholics in the country have asked to be taken off census rolls that identify them as Catholics when they are baptized as infants. Similar reports have come from Ireland and Austria, countries where priestly abuse of children has also been widely discovered. Most of the reported cases took place in the 1970s through the 1990s.

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