Court's ruling looms large on clergy abuse payouts

Tom Heinen begins this article in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by contrasting the total of upcoming clergy sexual abuse settlements by the Diocsese of Covington, Kentucky ($120 million), and the adjoining Archdiocese of Cincinnati ($3.2 million). The smaller payment in Ohio is due to more stringent requirements in its law, similar to requirements the Wisconsin Supreme Court may relax in a decision expected shortly. So how did the Archdiocese of Milwaukee get into this position?

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, 55, who arrived in 2002, apologized for the church at group listening sessions and met privately with victims. In late 2003, he announced that he was setting up about a $4 million settlement fund from the planned sale of properties and had commissioned an independent dispute resolution system for individual mediation.

That did not include selling the Cousins Center, which houses archdiocesan offices in St. Francis.

I continue to wonder how the Cousins Center could be more important than settling those claims. And if it is an essential facility (hard as that is to believe after actually being in the place), presumably it could have been mortgaged and the proceeds added to the settlement pool.

Dolan also agreed to group mediation with about 70 victims. Their representatives say they offered to settle for $8 million to $25 million before sessions broke off on March 8, 2004.

Usually that means all the claims could have been settled for between $4 million and $8 million. Presumably the Cousins Center is worth something, maybe enough to have bridged that gap.

The archdiocese has spent more than $4 million, archdiocesan spokeswoman Kathleen Hohl said. Properties sold for more than expected, and some remain to be sold, she added.

As of May 20, the archdiocese had spent $4,890,760 on mediation agreements and therapy through the independent mediation system, she said.

Not included is how much our Archdiocese has spent on legal fees and other litigation costs in the interim.

In what certainly sounds like more hardball by our Archdiocese, Peter Isely of the local chapter of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) sent a press release yesterday, "Dolan wants judge to publicize names, addresses of clergy child sex abuse victims."

This week, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, in an unprecedented legal move, petitioned Judge Guolee of Milwaukee County to make public the names and addresses of victims of notorious pedophile priest Fr. Siegfried Widera in a current fraud lawsuit filed against the Milwaukee Archdiocese. Victims were permitted by the court to file as John Does, which is customary for sexual assault cases.

Court documents show that Fr. Widera, who committed suicide in 2003 in Mexico while fleeing federal authorities for over 40 counts of child sexual abuse in Wisconsin, was known by church officials of the Milwaukee archdiocese to have raped and molested children, even after an earlier conviction in Wisconsin for child abuse. Archbishop Weakland secretly transferred Widera to a California diocese where he continued to assault children.

While I can't say this in every area, in his handling of these cases Archbishop Dolan reminds me of Archbishop Weakland.

Update: FWIW, I'm hearing that it's believed our Archdiocese has so far spent about a half million dollars defending the cases pending in California and about a quarter million dollars defending the pending cases in Wisconsin. In the group mediation, about a third of the cases involved religious order priests. If the orders paid one-third of the victim group's $8 million demand, our Archdiocese would owe a $5 1/3 million balance. And that assumes that was the victim group's bottom line demand, which doesn't appear certain.

An effort by our Archdiocese to force disclosure of alleged victims names would seem particularly egregious given how narrowly it has interpreted its own commitment to release names of perpetrator priests.

I can imagine a basis for our Archdiocese asking for disclosure, in that the claim is for fraud, not sexual abuse. I cannot imagine it actually taking that position, though, because the alleged fraud was failing to disclose a priest's prior sexual abuse and that this lead to the eventual victim unknowingly being subject to abuse by that priest.

Update 2: In a July 11, 2005 press release, Peter Isely for SNAP reports that Judge Guolee denied the motion to disclose the names of the plaintiffs, and that the Supreme Court's decision is expected to be released on Wednesday, July 13th.