By Richard Willing
USA Today [United States]
April 12, 2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-04-12-catholics_x.htm
The Catholic Church is having early success in fighting proposals in state legislatures that would permit people claiming they were sexually abused as children to sue priests and other church officials long after the alleged offenses occurred.
Measures proposed in nine states would suspend statutes of limitation and allow lawsuits to be filed regardless of when an alleged offense took place. The proposals are patterned on a 2003 California law that allowed a one-year window for suits to be filed there without regard to the statute of limitations.
Since March, aggressive lobbying by the church helped to bottle up such a measure in a state Senate committee in Maryland, and to alter the language of an Ohio bill to rule out new lawsuits. A bill in Colorado's Legislature is being debated, but it's a long shot because of intense Catholic opposition, the bill's supporters say. The church is gearing up to fight proposals in Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, speaks at the press conference regarding the offer of settlement from Spokane Catholic church officials in Spokane, Wash. Photo by the Amy Sinisterra, AP |
Mark Chopko, counsel to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, says the bills unfairly target Catholics and could add millions of dollars to the $1.38 billion the U.S. church has paid since 1950 to settle claims and for other expenses related to sexual abuse of minors by priests.
David Clohessy, director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), says new laws are needed because victims of childhood sex abuse often don't report it until long after the deadline for filing a lawsuit. They suppress memories of the abuse until they are well into adulthood, he says.
Church lobbyists are using a variety of arguments to block the bills. In Maryland, lawyers on key state committees were told that changing long-standing legal rules would be an unfair and dangerous precedent, says Richard Dowling, director of the Maryland Catholic Conference. In Colorado, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput urged parishioners to protest the "systematic dismantling and pillaging of the Catholic community" by a "peculiar kind of anti-Catholicism."
About 4,400 priests and deacons abused more than 11,000 minors from 1950 to 2002, according to a study by researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
Credible allegations of abuse declined from 1,092 in 2004 to 777 last year, according to an audit done for the bishops' conference. Payouts increased dramatically, from $158 million in 2004 to $467 million last year.
Since the abuse scandals came to light in 2002, six states have extended legal deadlines for filing abuse suits. In Maryland, alleged victims can sue until they turn 25. Victims' advocates say more states should follow California's example and eliminate all time limitations, at least for a one-year period.
"Predators are cunning and shrewd and manipulative, so (victims) tend at first to rationalize abuse and explain it away," Clohessy says. "Sometimes it takes decades of failure, your fourth marriage or your fifth divorce, before you begin to work inward and discover the cause." He says 98% of SNAP's 6,200 members "didn't realize they had been abused" until it was too late to file suits.
When California suspended limits in 2003, about 800 abuse lawsuits with a potential value of nearly $1 billion were filed, says William Bassett, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.
Chopko says dioceses often settle with abuse victims "as a matter of justice," even if the deadline for filing a lawsuit is past. The victims are offered less money than they might have won in a lawsuit, but they are encouraged to "take the lawyers out of it" and save the 40% or more in fees and expenses that lawyers often charge for arranging cash settlements.
"These people have been hurt, and we have an obligation," Chopko says. "But this is not the brass ring."
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