CAMDEN (NJ)
nj.com [New Jersey]
April 7, 2025
By Ted Sherman
Church misled the public with backstage legal fight over promised state investigation, they allege.
Childhood victims of abuse by members of the clergy say they were devastated when they learned that the Diocese of Camden — after promising transparency in the wake of a scandal that led to its bankruptcy — spent years waging a secret legal battle to kill the state’s efforts to further investigate its own “sordid history.”
Now in new filings with the New Jersey Supreme Court, which will rule on whether that investigation by a state grand jury should proceed, members of a survivors’ group said that investigation must continue.
“By filing for bankruptcy, the diocese sought a fresh start. Not only did the diocese seek to restructure its financial obligations — largely the claims of over 300 survivors of rape, sodomy, and other horrific sexual abuse arising out of the diocese’s failure to protect its most vulnerable — but it pledged a new way of operating,” they wrote in an amicus brief with the high court.
However, they complained that as the diocese was publicly vowing openness, its lawyers also had been imploring the state courts to quietly quash any continuing investigation, demanding that those efforts be shrouded in secrecy.
The Camden Diocese oversees nearly half a million Catholics in 62 parishes in Atlantic, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester and Salem counties.
Members of the survivors committee, represented by Lowenstein Sandler of Roseland, were among the creditors who filed claims against the Catholic Diocese of Camden after it declared bankruptcy in 2020. Overwhelmed by a flood of priest abuse victims applying to the New Jersey Independent Victims Compensation Program, the diocese filed for Chapter 11 in the wake of dozens of additional lawsuits after the state changed the law to allow victims to sue the Catholic Church.
The diocese ultimately agreed to a $87.5 million settlement in 2022 with more than 300 childhood victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy — in what some called one of the largest cash payments of its kind. That agreement, which was approved by the bankruptcy court, provided for the establishment of a trust that would be funded by the diocese and related Catholic entities over a four-year period, officials said at the time. The plan is still on appeal.
But the disclosure of the backstage legal fight over a promised state investigation into abuse allegations across the state has led to renewed anger by a so-called Committee of Tort Claimant Creditors representing other victims in the bankruptcy proceeding who had agreed to the settlement in Camden.
“The diocese not only misled the committee; it misled the public. Time and again, the diocese indicated that it was reinventing itself,” the committee wrote in their amicus filing. “Revelation of the diocese’s efforts to halt the grand jury process and to do so in secret has devastated and re-traumatized committee members.”
Lawyers for the survivors declined comment.
A spokesman for the Camden Diocese also declined comment.
Calls for a wider investigation into the allegations against members of the clergy came after a Pennsylvania grand jury report in 2018 that had graphically detailed the abuse by priests who had preyed upon children in that state for years.
In response to that report, then-New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal announced he would undertake a similar investigation of the state’s dioceses and make those results public through a grand jury presentment. But despite the creation of a special task force and the promise of a grand jury investigation, the state never moved forward.
A state grand jury, it was later learned, had in fact sent subpoenas to the Archdiocese of Newark and the dioceses of Paterson, Metuchen, Trenton and Camden — ultimately reaching agreements with all but Camden.
Nobody knew that the Camden Diocese had mounted legal challenges until the unexpected release of a once-sealed transcript from a lower court hearing.
In its objections to the subpoena, the diocese had challenged the grand jury’s authority as its lawyers argued that no state law allowed it to present such a case, which they said would violate the state and federal constitutions’ guarantee of a separation of church and state.
In an earlier statement, the Camden Diocese said the issue before the court was purely a legal one: whether New Jersey law governing grand jury presentments applies only to public, governmental entities and public officials, not private entities. Spokesman Michael Walsh added that since 2002, the diocese published a list of “credibly accused clergy,” all of whom have been removed from ministry.
The confidential court records revolving around the legal challenges by the diocese were finally ordered released last month by the New Jersey Supreme Court, with the justices planning to hold oral arguments later this year on whether to reverse a trial judge’s decision that ruled in favor of the Camden Diocese.
The survivors in their brief charged that the diocese had sought a “premature, covert, and legally unjustified shield” from a grand jury presentment, in contradiction of its public pronouncements of transparency. Of even greater concern was that they said the settlement plan, which garnered their support, had been predicated on both a monetary settlement and a contractual agreement by the diocese to be candid.
“If the diocese reverts to its secretive ways, the public faces imminent harm,” the survivors group said in their amicus brief, urging the court to allow the state to proceed with its investigation.
In a second amicus brief, two other organizations also called for the grand jury probe to continue. That filing by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, and the New Jersey Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said the Superior Court Judge Peter E. Warshaw Jr. in Mercer County, who had agreed with Camden’s challenge, got it wrong.
“The secrecy that acts of child sexual abuse thrive upon can only be eliminated by shining every possible light on them,” stated their brief, filed by Baldante & Rubenstein of Philadelphia. They called the grand jury “one of the brightest and best spotlights this state has to offer.”
Calling the judge’s ruling “patently unjust and contrary to New Jersey’s strong public policy of protecting children,” they called for the Supreme Court to reverse it.
Ted Sherman, NJ Advance Media, tsherman@njadvancemedia.com