Church Sex Abuse Costs Rise Despite Drop in New Allegations, by Alan Cooperman, Washington Post, March 31, 2006

Church Sex Abuse Costs Rise Despite Drop in New Allegations

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post
March 31, 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/03/30/AR2006033001776.html

The financial costs of the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church rose dramatically in 2005, even as the number of new allegations fell, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said yesterday.

Releasing an annual report on their efforts to prevent abuse of minors by priests, the bishops said U.S. dioceses spent $399 million last year on legal settlements with sex abuse victims and $68 million on lawyers' fees, psychological counseling and related expenses -- about three times more than they paid in 2004.

The church's cumulative expenditures on sex abuse claims in the United States are approaching $1.5 billion. The tally of known victims has topped 12,500. The number of priests and deacons who have been credibly accused since 1950 is close to 5,000.

Bishop William Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, addresses the media at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Thursday, March 30, 2006 to discuss the audit of the third annual Report of the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
Photo by the AP Photo/Adele Starr

In releasing the blizzard of statistics, Catholic Church officials and their academic consultants put a generally positive gloss on the data, suggesting that the worst of the crisis is over.

Karen Terry, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the vast majority of the abuse took place from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. There has been a sharp decline in the number of cases since the early 1990s, which an analysis indicates is not just a matter of a lag in reporting, she said.

"We know that sexual abuse is underreported and that more people will come forward," she said. "But the decrease in sexual abuse cases is real." She added that the decline mirrors the general societal decrease in crime, substance abuse and sex abuse in the 1990s.

Teresa M. Kettelkamp, a former Illinois state police officer who heads the bishops' Office of Child and Youth Protection, said "it is important to acknowledge how much has been done" to remove abusers from the priesthood, including 57 priests who were suspended in 2005.

She said U.S. dioceses have conducted background checks on 1.6 million adults who work with minors and have provided "safe environment" training to 5.7 million children, 95 percent of all those entrusted to the care of the church.

Bishop William S. Skylstad, president of the bishops' conference, said he has both "a sense of progress" and "a great sense of the continuing impact of the sexual abuse crisis" because his own diocese of Spokane, Wash., is in bankruptcy and he was recently accused of molesting a teenage girl in the 1960s. He has denied the allegation.

The bishops' conference said U.S. dioceses received 783 credible allegations of abuse against 532 clergy members in 2005. There were 1,092 allegations against 756 priests in 2004.

Of the new allegations, nine -- or less than 1 percent -- stemmed from incidents that took place in 2005 and were reported by people still younger than 18. Nearly 87 percent of the remaining 774 new allegations involved abuse that occurred before the 1990s. Of the 532 priests accused in 2005, nearly two-thirds had been identified in prior allegations, and 418 were deceased or out of ministry, church officials said.

William Gavin, a former FBI official whose Boston-based consulting firm has been hired by the bishops to conduct annual sex abuse "audits" of U.S. dioceses, said 169 of the 191 Catholic dioceses examined in 2005 were "fully in compliance" with the sex abuse policy the bishops adopted in Dallas in 2002.

Those in compliance included the archdioceses of Washington and Baltimore, and the dioceses of Richmond and Arlington.

Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said the report "once again proves that bishops can't be trusted to monitor themselves."

She noted that the auditors found the Archdiocese of Chicago to be fully in compliance with the charter in 2004 and 2005. Yet in recent months, two previously accused priests were found working in active ministry in Chicago.

Patricia O. Ewers, chairman of the National Review Board, a panel of lay Catholics appointed by the bishops as a watchdog over the church's handling of sex abuse, also said that "recent events in Chicago make it clear that the church has not done enough."