Regular readers will know of my own struggle with the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. I've documented it in some detail (see the sidebar for links).
Now comes news that the Catholic Church has once again chosen to behave like a business organization rather than as the Body of Christ on earth, as it is called to be.
On October 1, 2020, with sexual abuse lawsuits piling up, the Rockville Centre diocese filed a “voluntary petition for reorganization” under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
“This decision was not made lightly,” said Bishop John O. Barres in a statement at the time. And perhaps that is true. But as a legal strategy it was a no-brainer, since its primary effect was to undermine the purpose of the Child Victims Act. Bankruptcy gave the diocese the upper hand, while the victims became creditors who will be lucky to get a fraction of what a jury might have awarded them.
As of July, 41 Catholic dioceses and religious orders have used Chapter 11 filings to deal with the decades of horrific crimes committed by thousands of priests. Those filings have stopped lawsuits in their tracks and forced victims to accept pennies on the dollar, a Free Press investigation has revealed. To put it bluntly, long after the Church looked the other way at clergy sexual abuse, it has now found another way to deprive the victims of justice: the bankruptcy courts.
It has long been standard practice for companies facing massive numbers of lawsuits—for manufacturing asbestos, say, or marketing OxyContin—to file for bankruptcy. A Chapter 11 filing does not require companies to be insolvent; they simply need to show “financial distress,” allowing them to restructure their debts while continuing to operate.
Chapter 11 shuts down all litigation, halting discovery, the process by which litigants gather documents and witness testimony to support their claims. It prevents additional lawsuits from being filed. It eliminates jury trials and instead shifts the ongoing cases to federal bankruptcy court, where any settlement requires a process of mediation between the bankrupt company’s lawyers and lawyers for the creditors. That mediation often takes years. Although additional claims can be made, they too are routed to the bankruptcy court, where claimants fill out standard claim forms rather than filing lawsuits.
Early on, said Marci Hamilton, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who represented abuse victims in many early clergy sex abuse cases, dioceses used some unorthodox defenses to wriggle out of their obligations to sexual abuse victims. “They argued that it was unconstitutional for them to have to provide discovery,” she recalled. “It was unconstitutional to interfere with any kind of exchange between a bishop and a priest. They called it the formation privilege. And they argued that you couldn’t punish them for doing nothing but forgiving. Because forgiveness was what their faith required.”
In court, recalled Hamilton, “I dismantled all those arguments.”
But when states began passing laws like the Child Victims Act—ultimately, 21 did so, as did the District of Columbia—many dioceses decided that their best course of action was to adopt the bankruptcy playbook.
“It was a brilliant tactic because the bankruptcy system makes it about saving the debtor,” Hamilton said. “So they were able to flip the lawsuits from the victims being at the center of it, to them being at the center. And the victims just became collateral damage.”
In New York alone, nearly 5,000 people claiming to have been abused by clergy or staff came forward during the two-year exemption period from the statute of limitations. In September 2019, just one month after abuse victims were allowed to file lawsuits, the Rochester diocese sought Chapter 11 protection. Rockville Centre was second. Overall, six of the state’s eight dioceses have filed for bankruptcy. (The only ones that haven’t are the Archdiocese of New York, based in Manhattan, and the Diocese of Brooklyn.)
“Bankruptcy eviscerates the whole architecture for ferreting out the truth,” Paul Mones, a plaintiff’s lawyer who has represented dozens of victims in Rockville Centre diocese cases, told me. “By removing cases from the civil justice system, there is no cross-examination of church hierarchy, and all the ways to tease out the injurious behavior of church abusers gets whitewashed. It’s all about how much money the entity has to distribute, and nothing else. Lawyers are reduced to being financial managers.”
There's more at the link.
I think this is utterly horrendous in moral terms. The Church claims to be the Body of Christ, yet uses completely non-Christian secular tactics to avoid accepting responsibility for the damage it has done to so many people. Personally, I don't care if bankruptcies were to reduce the Church to meeting in private homes and hired halls, giving up all its luxurious properties and accumulated assets. Isn't that what the early Church did? Isn't that how it took root and grew? However, the Church has become utterly focused on itself as a business. Its bishops (and, to a certain extent, their subordinate clergy) see themselves as "defending the Church against secular attack" when, in fact, they are focused on defending the Church's assets - not its teachings, not its eternal mission, and most certainly not the victims of evil acts on the part of some few of its ministers and other members.
Every time I read reports such as this, I quail inwardly. Every Catholic - every Christian - knows the judgment that awaits all of us, when we must give account of our lives to the Righteous Judge. How is it even possible to think of justifying such attitudes and actions to Jesus Christ? "Oh, I saved your Church a few million dollars, by denying justice to a few of its victims." How many bishops and priests dare to think of trying to excuse that to the Christ who said, "It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones."
I have committed many sins in my life, and I'll have to accept responsibility for them when my turn comes to face the Judgment . . . but I do most sincerely thank God that I won't have to account for that sort of sin. The thought of trying to plea-bargain my way out of that is just too ghastly to contemplate - and, absent the most radical repentance and conversion, I doubt very much that it will succeed.
Peter
