UNITED STATES
The Washington Times
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 31, 2006
Sex-abuse accusations against the nation's priests were down last year, but the flood of millions of dollars in payouts more than tripled and shows no signs of stopping, the United States' Roman Catholic bishops said yesterday.
"It is disheartening to us bishops, as it must be to all Catholics, to find that there are still some allegations of abuse by clerics against today's children and young people," Bishop William S. Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said during the release of the conference's annual report on sex-abuse statistics.
The report, commissioned in 2002 by the USCCB's Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, tracks what the country's 195 Catholic dioceses are doing to end a sex-abuse crisis that has involved 12,537 youths -- mostly boys and young men -- and 4,827 priests.