OREGON
The Oregonian
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
STEVE WOODWARD
Seven months after promising to release the personal files of 37 priests accused of molesting children, the Archdiocese of Portland handed over this month the contents of nearly 100 boxes of records to insurance companies that are fighting the church over paying for sex-abuse settlements.
The 10 insurers hope to use the files to show that archdiocesan officials were aware of sex-abuse allegations against their clergymen, yet routinely did nothing to stop the alleged activity. If true, the practice would invalidate the liability insurance policies. Otherwise, the insurers would be obligated to pay for settlements and legal defense costs, which could exceed $16 million.
In an e-mail made public last week, a Portland-based lawyer for the insurers, Joseph A. Field, complained to archdiocesan lawyers that they had "dumped" an estimated 200,000 pages of documents "in an unreasonable and unusable form."
Field wrote that the archdiocese instructed the company that scans the documents into electronic form to block insurers from accessing the original source files or file labels, leaving them unable to sort the files or take inventory.
"I wouldn't say we dumped them," archdiocese spokesman Bud Bunce said Tuesday. "I'd say we gave them what they wanted." Bunce said the archdiocese has since agreed to provide the source labels.
The insurance action is part of the complex bankruptcy of the Portland archdiocese, the first of three U.S. Roman Catholic dioceses ever to seek Chapter 11 reorganization. The archdiocese filed for protection from creditors in July last year.