Then-Archbishop of Paris Michel Aupetit attends a celebration at the Sacre Coeur basilica in April 2020.
By JOHN LEICESTER
French police are investigating an allegation that the former archbishop of Paris sexually assaulted a woman who is under legal protection as a vulnerable person, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Michel Aupetit, who unexpectedly resigned in 2021 after admitting to an “ambiguous” relationship with a woman in 2012, denies any wrongdoing, his lawyer said.
The police investigation of Aupetit was opened on the basis of information from the Paris archdiocese, the Paris prosecutors’ office said, confirming French media reports.
It was launched in late November over a preliminary potential charge of sexual assault on a vulnerable person, the prosecutors’ office said. The alleged assault took place several years ago, it added, providing no other details.
Aupetit’s lawyer, Jean Reinhart, said the inquiry was triggered by a letter sent to the Paris archdiocese. The letter was then forwarded to prosecutors, an automatic procedure for handling potential abuse cases that Aupetit himself put in place when he was archbishop, Reinhart said. Prosecutors then launched the police probe.
Reinhart said Aupetit has not seen the letter, and hasn’t been told who wrote it or what specifically it contains.
“My client is flabbergasted, doesn’t know what this is about,” the lawyer said. “We are completely in the dark.”
Aupetit became Paris archbishop in 2018. Pope Francis quickly accepted his resignation in December 2021.
The pontiff subsequently said he accepted the resignation because Aupetit couldn’t govern effectively after “gossip” about his relationship with a woman besmirched his “good name.”
Francis said there had been “lapses” with Aupetit involving sexual sins. He said they weren’t that serious and involved “some caresses and massages.”
Roman Catholic priests take vows of chastity.
Aupetit’s resignation piled more upheaval on the French Catholic Church, which has been severely undermined by a long history of sexual abuses. A report in October 2021 estimated that some 3,000 French priests had committed sexual abuse over the past 70 years.
In 2020, the pope accepted the resignation of French Roman Catholic Cardinal Philippe Barbarin in connection with the cover-up of sexual abuse of dozens of boys by a predatory priest.
Other investigations are also underway. In November, the prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Marseille opened a preliminary investigation of “aggravated sexual assault” against Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, one of France’s highest-ranking Catholic prelates.
In a letter that was read out during a conference of French bishops, Ricard said that he had abused a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago and was withdrawing from his religious duties.
Former pope drew strong criticism for Church’s views on homosexuality and women priests
Fr Tony Flannery says he suffered ‘at the hands of a system shaped and defined by Cardinal Ratzinger’.
By Sarah Mac Donald
Several leading Irish priests who clashed with Pope Benedict’s stance on key issues admit it will be “very hard” to mourn his death.
he issues over which they strongly differed range from women priests to the church’s teaching on homosexuality.
Censured priest Fr Tony Flannery, who was put out of ministry during the papacy of Benedict, said he had suffered “at the hands of a system shaped and defined by Cardinal Ratzinger”, so he “doesn’t really feel much regret at his death”.
The 75-year-old Redemptorist priest said he was “one of the Irish people whose life has been most significantly affected by his [Benedict’s] attitudes and his exercise of power”.
Fr Flannery has been forbidden to exercise his ministry as a priest since 2012 over his views on women priests and the church’s teaching on homosexuality and contraception.
He noted the impact of Benedict’s papacy, from 2005 to 2013, and his time as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office on theologians, priests, religious and lay people who, like Fr Flannery, were punished for their writings on matters relating to church doctrine and various aspects of the faith.
“I wouldn’t even attempt to measure the negative impact his teaching and action had on LGBTQ people, and on those abused by priests and religious,” he said.
Fr Roy Donovan, of the Association of Catholic Priests, said he found it “very hard to mourn” for Benedict and remained “very angry” over his pontificate and his time as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF).
Referring to Benedict’s negative comments on gay people and his silencing of those with whom he disagreed, Fr Donovan asked: “What was he afraid of? Why did he need to adopt an approach of circling the wagons? With his intellect, why could he not listen and debate opposing views?”
His comment was echoed by Fr Iggy O’Donovan. He said that the German pontiff, who died on Saturday, had led a “McCarthy-type purge of fellow scholars”.
He said: “It was on his watch at the CDF that [theologian] Hans Kung, his one-time colleague, was stripped of his right to teach Catholic theology. Think of [Leonardo] Boff and [Gustavo] Gutierrez, the liberation theology scholars. Our own Fr Sean Fagan was hounded to his death.”
Fr O’Donovan said that the staunchly traditionalist theologian who succeeded John Paul II was “brilliant” but had inflicted great damage.
Separately, the reform group, We Are Church Ireland, has described Pope Benedict as “a highly contradictory theologian who shaped the Roman Catholic Church for decades in a backward-looking way like no other post-conciliar church leader”.
In a statement, Colm Holmes said Benedict, whose funeral takes place on Thursday, had left “a climate of fear”.
Meanwhile, the Vatican has revealed that Benedict’s last words were “Lord, I love you.”
Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, Benedict’s long-time secretary who lived in the Vatican monastery where the former pope took up residence after his 2013 retirement, said a nurse heard the late cleric utter those words about 3am on Saturday.
He died later that morning about 9.30am local time.
“Benedict XVI, with a faint voice but in a very distinct way, said in Italian, ‘Lord, I love you,’” Archbishop Gaenswein said, adding that it happened when the aides tending to Benedict were changing shifts.
“I wasn’t there in that moment, but the nurse a little later recounted it,” the archbishop said.
“They were his last comprehensible words, because afterwards, he wasn’t able to express himself any more.”
In the United States, admirers of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI remembered him warmly for his theological prowess and devotion to traditional doctrine. However, some U.S. Catholics, on learning of his death Saturday, recalled him as an obstacle to progress in combating clergy sex abuse and expanding the role of women in the church.
Professor Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, depicted Benedict as “a man of unwavering faith, deep conviction and towering intellect,” yet added that he left “a complicated legacy.”
She noted that last February, following a report that implicated him in the cover-up of sexual abuse during the years he served as Archbishop of Munich, Benedict “acknowledged his failure to act decisively at times in confronting sexual abusers.”
Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, noted that Benedict – before becoming pope – had a lead role in enforcing church discipline at a time when the sex-abuse crisis was making headlines in the U.S. two decades ago.
“When he was elected to succeed John Paul II as pope in 2005, Benedict XVI was the person who was most knowledgeable about clergy sexual abuse.” Millies said via email. “Yet, the crisis continued to fester throughout Benedict’s papacy past his resignation in 2013 and even today.”
Millies suggested that Benedict’s most important legacy was his resignation, arising from “his recognition that he could not fix the abuse crisis or accomplish much else in the face of the deeply entrenched power of the Vatican’s centralized bureaucracy.”
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who heads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, and is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, praised Benedict as “a superb theologian” and recalled how the announcement of his resignation “shocked the world.”
“He recognized the great demands made of him as the chief shepherd of the Universal Church of a billion Catholics worldwide, and his physical limitations for such a monumental task,” Broglio said in a statement. “Even in retirement, retreating to live out a life in quiet prayer and study, he continued to teach us how to be a true disciple of Christ.”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who was appointed archbishop of New York and nominated as a cardinal by Benedict, praised the pope emeritus as a “erudite, wise, and holy man, who spoke the truth with love.”
Dolan held a special Mass for Benedict at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; its bells tolled 95 times before the Mass — reflecting Benedict’s age when he died.
President Joe Biden — a church-going Catholic who differs with church teaching on abortion and some other social issues — issued a statement evoking a meeting with Benedict at the Vatican in 2011. Biden recalled Benedict’s “generosity and welcome as well as our meaningful conversation.”
“He will be remembered as a renowned theologian, with a lifetime of devotion to the Church, guided by his principles and faith,” Biden added. “May his focus on the ministry of charity continue to be an inspiration to us all.”
Monsignor Kevin Irwin, dean emeritus at Catholic University of America, called Benedict a “theology professor extraordinaire… a clear thinker who was a quiet contributor to the church’s continuity after Pope John Paul II.”
Irwin said Benedict’s resignation left him stunned.
“But, in the end it was about understanding he was overwhelmed and letting him go,” Irwin said.
Monsignor Stephen Doktorczyk, vicar general for the Diocese of Orange in Southern California, remembered Benedict as a gracious leader who had the ability to build bridges and foster reconciliation.
“There was this unfair perception that he was there to cut people off at the knees,” said Doktorczyk, who served for five years — from September 2011 to December 2016 – in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office responsible for processing clergy sex abuse complaints. “He tried to be a peacemaker. When there was a way to reconcile, he tried to look outside the box.”
Others were more critical, including Kate McElwee, executive director of the U.S.-based Women’s Ordination Conference, which seeks to enable women to be ordained as Catholic priests.
“For many Catholics, Pope Benedict’s papacy is a chapter of our church’s history that we are still healing from,” McElwee said. Her statement asserted that Benedict, as head of the Vatican’s doctrine office and as pope, “orchestrated a rigid campaign of theological suppression on the question of women’s ordination, creating a culture of fear and pain within the church.”
Also offering a harsh judgment was David Clohessy, a longtime leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
“In more than 30 years as a mighty Vatican bureaucrat – nearly 10 of them as the world’s top Catholic figure – Benedict enabled countless child sex crimes and cover-ups to continue by virtually refusing to publicly expose even one child molesting cleric or a complicit church official,” Clohessy said via email.
“With his extensive power and bully pulpit, he could have prevented hundreds or perhaps thousands of kids from being sexually assaulted. But he didn’t. Instead, he chose, time and time again, to side with ordained clergy over vulnerable children.”
The Survivors Network’s leadership, in a statement, said honoring Benedict now “is not only wrong, it is shameful.:
“Benedict was more concerned about the church’s deteriorating image and financial flow to the hierarchy versus grasping the concept of true apologies followed by true amends to victims of abuse,” the statement said,
The leader of a Maryland-based group that advocates for LGBTQ Catholics, Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, noted that Benedict — prior to his papacy — helped shape a document that called homosexual orientation as ”an objective disorder” and a Catechism describing sexual activity between people of the same gender as “acts of grave depravity.”
“Those documents caused — and still cause — grave pastoral harm to many LGBTQ+ people,” DeBernardo said,.
A victim of child sexual abuse, who Reuters agreed only to identify by his first initial, C, is pictured here at a California state park, December 23, 2022.
Lawmakers around the United States have tried to grant justice to victims of decades-old incidents of child sexual abuse by giving them extra time to file lawsuits. Now some of the defendants in these cases, including church and youth organizations, are finding a safe haven: America’s bankruptcy courts.<
In New York, nearly 11,000 cases flooded state courts, many seeking to hold Catholic dioceses responsible for sexual abuse by clergy, after a 2019 law suspended statutes of limitations that would have otherwise barred many of the lawsuits. In response, four New York dioceses that collectively faced more than 500 sexual-abuse claims filed for bankruptcy. That halted the cases — and blocked those from anyone who might sue later — and forced the plaintiffs to negotiate a one-time settlement for all abuse claims in bankruptcy court.
The pattern has taken hold across the United States, a Reuters review of bankruptcies precipitated by mass child sexual-abuse litigation found.
Many of the defendants turning to bankruptcy court are nonprofit organizations. In court filings dating back to 2009, the Boy Scouts of America, a New York boys & girls club and 13 separate Catholic institutions each have cited state laws extending abuse victims’ right to sue as factors in their decisions to seek bankruptcy protection.
Such bankruptcies are “the counterpunch” to the state laws enabling more victims to seek justice and compensation through lawsuits, said Stephen Rubino, a lawyer who’s represented clergy abuse victims for more than 30 years.
In all, 23 states, two territories and Washington, D.C., have passed laws that suspend statutes of limitations for sexual-abuse victims who were previously prevented from suing over older cases. The suspensions typically last a year or more, allowing plaintiffs to file new lawsuits involving old abuse cases during that period. California, New York and several other states passed such laws in 2019.
Bankruptcy courts are undermining the impact of the statutes, some legal experts and victims’ advocates say. Judges overseeing these Chapter 11 filings set their own deadlines to file a sexual-abuse claim for compensation from the bankruptcy settlement.
Victims who miss the bankruptcy claims-filing deadline receive nothing or are forced to compete for limited funds set aside for unknown future claimants, the Reuters review of bankruptcies found.
“As we dramatically increase access to justice through statutes-of-limitations reform, we have more organizations going into bankruptcy because, frankly, bankruptcy law favors the organizations,” said Marci Hamilton, the founder of Child USA, a group that has advocated for laws expanding sexual-abuse victims’ rights to sue.
Child sexual-abuse victims often don’t come forward until much later in life, sometimes past the age of 50, according to several victims’ lawyers and studies on abuse disclosure. Some are not aware of bankruptcy proceedings that affect them until it is too late.
Bankruptcy claims-filing deadlines can force victims to come forward before they are ready, Hamilton said. And abuse claimants have limited leverage in Chapter 11 cases that halt their litigation and shield organizations such as dioceses, schools or youth organizations from current and future lawsuits, she said.
“The federal bankruptcy law is just defective when it comes to sexual-abuse victims,” Hamilton said. “Their voice is just stolen from them.”
Reuters identified settlements in 23 bankruptcies precipitated by child sexual-abuse scandals that halted current and future lawsuits and forced claimants to seek compensation from a trust. The cases involved the Boy Scouts, 21 Catholic organizations and USA Gymnastics. The youth gymnastics organization filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2018 amid a surge of lawsuits alleging abuse by convicted child sexual abuser Larry Nassar. (Now in prison, Nassar could not be reached for comment.)
The Boy Scouts and USA Gymnastics did not comment for this story
The Boy Scouts and others have argued that their bankruptcy plans seek to pay claimants fairly and equitably, whereas civil litigation can result in some victims winning large jury verdicts and others receiving smaller judgments or nothing. USA Gymnastics has said it sought bankruptcy protection “to pave the way toward a settlement” with abuse survivors, who last year approved a plan paying them $380 million.
The organizations also often conduct extensive marketing campaigns to ensure that potential victims know they can seek compensation in the Chapter 11 cases, a review of the cases shows. The Boy Scouts, for instance, said on a website the group set up for restructuring that it launched a “comprehensive noticing campaign” in the media.
The Madison Square Boys & Girls Club in New York City referred Reuters to a bankruptcy-court declaration filed in June by its chief financial officer, Jeffrey Dold. Dold said the organization sought Chapter 11 protection after trying and failing to resolve about 140 pending claims of sexual abuse by club employees and volunteers between the 1940s and 1980s, all filed after the passage of New York’s claims-revival law. The club filed bankruptcy, Dold said, “to provide a forum to address those claims fairly and equitably.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had no comment on the new state laws or their impact nationwide on Catholic organizations facing sexual-abuse lawsuits. In a statement to Reuters, it said it defers to state and local catholic leadership organizations on state laws and bankruptcies. The conference noted the importance of “pastoral outreach” to abuse victims and said that local dioceses have victim assistance coordinators to “assist survivors and accompany them as they seek healing.”
The nonprofit organizations’ bankruptcies don’t protect the individual abusers themselves, whom victims can still sue. But they do grant lawsuit immunity to the entities that oversaw employees or volunteers accused of abuse.
Lawyers defending organizations targeted by sexual-abuse claims, along with some plaintiffs lawyers, say bankruptcy provides a fair way to compensate victims, many of whom want to avoid the ordeal of a lawsuit and a potential trial. Moreover, organizations and insurers paying the settlements won’t agree to any deal that doesn’t shield them from additional liability, said Susan Boswell, a retired lawyer who represented dioceses in bankruptcies from Arizona to Minnesota.
“If you can’t have finality,” she said, “then you are not ever going to be able to get one of these cases done.”
America’s federal bankruptcy courts play a critical role in justice and commerce by giving businesses overwhelmed by debt an orderly process to settle with creditors during a reorganization or liquidation. Those debts can include liability from lawsuits over deadly products, fraud, sexual abuse or other wrongdoing.
The power of U.S. bankruptcy courts to grant lawsuit immunity to organizations in bankruptcy, their leaders and affiliated entities has expanded over time. And so have the legal tactics of entities seeking Chapter 11 protection: Some corporations engulfed in scandals are now creating subsidiaries solely to absorb their lawsuit liability and declare bankruptcy.
Nonprofit organizations facing sexual-abuse lawsuits have pulled another page from the corporate bankruptcy playbook: In striking settlements, they typically seek “nondebtor releases” for their associated entities, such as religious schools and individual parishes. Such releases shield people and entities from lawsuits over issues taken up in bankruptcy settlements. By piggybacking on a nonprofit’s Chapter 11 filing, its affiliated organizations or leaders often get these liability shields without having to file for bankruptcy themselves.
Judges often appoint someone to advocate for the interests of potential victims who have not yet sued or made a claim in bankruptcy court. Known as future claims representatives, these appointees are often lawyers or financial professionals who are paid by the debtor and tasked with estimating the number of future claims and the funds needed to cover them. The reality, however, is that late filers often end up competing for smaller amounts than those who meet the deadline, according to court records reviewed by Reuters and attorneys involved in the proceedings. Unknown claimants become “numbers on a chart,” Rubino said.
JUSTICE DENIED
A former Boy Scout, C, alleges a Scout leader abused him when he was a teenager. Reuters agreed to identify the former Scout, now 40, only by his first initial.
He sought compensation in the Boy Scouts bankruptcy in June, long after a deadline of November 16, 2020 for filing claims. C is now unlikely to recover much, if anything, from the $2.46 billion settlement the Boy Scouts reached with claimants alleging sexual abuse, his lawyer said. That’s because claimants who miss the deadline face a gauntlet of additional hurdles and conditions, according to C’s lawyer and a review of the Boy Scouts settlement terms.
The Boy Scouts bankruptcy reorganization plan, approved by a judge in September, halts all lawsuits against the Boy Scouts, local councils, churches and other organizations that chartered scouting activities.
The bankruptcy’s claims-filing rules take precedence over a recent law passed in California, where C says he was abused, that expanded sexual-abuse victims’ rights to sue. The bankruptcy proceedings generally trump state laws because bankruptcy courts are federal, and typically have the power to override state statutes and halt state lawsuits or court orders.
Reuters Image
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein reasoned in approving the Boy Scouts settlement that it was a better solution for victims than seeking compensation in trial courts.
Silverstein declined to comment for this story. In a July opinion approving aspects of the Scouts’ reorganization plan, she noted that insurance carriers, local Scouts councils and chartered organizations would not contribute to the settlement without receiving nondebtor releases from liability. She agreed with lawyers for the Boy Scouts and some claimants that the only alternative to a settlement was a “‘death trap’ of litigation with minimal recoveries in sight.”
“These boys–now men–seek and deserve compensation,” the judge wrote, for “abuse which has had a profound effect on their lives and for which no compensation will ever be enough.”
Beyond questions of fair compensation, C said the bankruptcy is preventing him from getting his day in court against the Boy Scouts to present what happened to him.
C grew up in an unstable home in northern California. His mother considered the Boy Scouts a safe environment for her son. For years after a Scout leader allegedly abused him and other boys, C struggled with acknowledging that what had happened to him was wrong, he told Reuters. He had trusted his Scout leader.
Within the past couple of years, he spoke at length with another former Scout about the leader’s behavior, he said. The emotional conversation prompted C to reflect on the damage in his own life stemming from the abuse. He said in an interview that his own struggles relating to others began to make more sense. C lives with his mother, sometimes sleeps in his car and has struggled to find a steady career.
“I’m waiting to stand in front of a judge,” C said, and hoping for that judge to say: “‘What happened to you was wrong.’”
‘THE PRIEST WOULD NEVER DO THAT’
Some plaintiffs’ attorneys say bankruptcy proceedings can provide a better way to compensate many sexual-abuse victims than trial courts. Victims often don’t want to go through the ordeal of suing their abusers or the organizations that may have enabled them, said Dan Lapinski, a Motley Rice LLC lawyer representing Boy Scouts claimants. For them, seeking compensation through bankruptcy can allow victims to file a claim confidentially and avoid reliving their trauma in open court.
“I have clients who fall into that category” in the Scouts matter, Lapinski said, noting that these victims might not have pursued their claim at all outside of bankruptcy court.
Financial coffers of individual dioceses are usually smaller than those of large corporations, said Boswell, the retired lawyer who has represented dioceses facing abuse allegations in bankruptcies. Expensive litigation cuts into the money available for compensation, she said, but a bankruptcy reorganization can attempt to pay all claimants equitably.
Still, there is often little left for claimants who come forward later, after bankruptcy filing deadlines pass.
In January 2020, a 59-year old former altar boy named Henry attended a church service in Minnesota on a visit back to the state to see family. After the service, Henry said, the priest spoke to parishioners about the financial impact of the 2018 bankruptcy of the local Winona-Rochester diocese, caused in part by sexual-abuse claims.
Henry knew the abuse first-hand. When he was 17, a priest assaulted Henry in a pool shower after swimming, he said in an interview. He had kept what happened to himself in part because he thought nobody would believe him, said Henry, who spoke on condition that he be identified only by his middle name.
Before clergy sexual-abuse scandals emerged worldwide, his community’s attitude was “the church would never do that, the priest would never do that,” he said. “You’re kind of squelched from the get-go.”
Finding out about the bankruptcy in church that day emboldened Henry to come forward, too, he said. Two days after the priest’s comments, he contacted a lawyer who filed a late claim on his behalf. But relatively little money — a maximum of $750,000 — had been set aside for claimants who came forward after a 2019 deadline. Henry received $20,000, which he described as “an almost laughable“ amount.
Henry could receive more money later, depending on how many additional claims are filed and how a trustee who determines payouts views his claim. But a final determination won’t be made until a deadline for filing late claims passes several years from now, according to documents Reuters reviewed. The judge in the case declined to comment.
By comparison, the settlement covering the 145 sexual-abuse claimants who filed on time was nearly $28 million. That would equate to about $190,000 per victim. The amount individual claimants might receive varies, depending on factors including the duration, severity and impact of their alleged abuse, according to court documents.
“What I don’t like is that they put some arbitrary cap on anybody who filed after” the deadline, Henry said.
Peter Martin, a spokesperson for the Winona-Rochester diocese, declined to comment on its bankruptcy proceedings. Martin did not respond to inquiries about Henry’s allegations of sexual abuse.
POWER AND TRUST
Statutes of limitations exist for good reason, some legal scholars say.
>Historically, states enacted them to encourage plaintiffs to file timely lawsuits based on “reasonably fresh” evidence, said Marie T. Reilly, a professor at Penn State Law in University Park, Pennsylvania. Reilly argues that allowing victims to sue long after their alleged abuse threatens the integrity of the legal system in the name of exacting retribution against institutions such as Catholic dioceses.
Over time, memories deteriorate, witnesses die and documents can go missing, she said. “The ability to mount a defense deteriorates with the passage of time,” Reilly said.
New York State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Democrat, sponsored the state’s bipartisan legislation reviving child sexual-abuse claims. He told Reuters he pushed the bill because it can be especially difficult for individuals to come forward with allegations against abusers who are often “in positions of power and trust.”
For thousands of victims with revived legal rights to seek accountability from institutions in trial courts, bankruptcy filings can be crushing.
Doug Kennedy was a teenage Boy Scouts camp staffer in upstate New York when a camp director raped him repeatedly and forced him to engage in other sexual activity, according to a lawsuit he filed. His case was halted by the Boy Scouts bankruptcy. In the years after the assaults, he told Reuters, he buried his memories of the abuse.
The man Kennedy accused of abuse, Bruce DeSandre, declined to comment through his attorney. In a court filing, DeSandre denied Kennedy’s allegations of sexual abuse and argued that New York state’s revival law was unconstitutional.
When Kennedy, now a college professor, finally came to grips with his abuse, the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit had passed.
In January 2019, he retreated to his office at Virginia Wesleyan University, drew the shades and watched a streaming feed of the New York state legislature’s vote to change the law and allow victims like Kennedy to file lawsuits over abuse that occurred long ago.
“I broke down, completely broke down,” he said.
He thought he would finally get a chance to get accountability for what was allowed to happen to him. Later that year, in August, he filed his lawsuit against defendants including a Boy Scouts local council and DeSandre.
About six months later, the Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy. Kennedy said his feeling of hope drained away when he heard the news.
“Bankruptcy is not justice,” he said. “Bankruptcy is business.”
— Church’s effort to stay afloat while settling abuse cases is scorned as a cynical move to shield secrets and assets.
Rev. Robert Vasa, the new Coadjutor Bishop of Santa Rosa, closes his eyes in prayer during a mass for his reception at St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Santa Rosa, California, Sunday, March 6, 2011.
Scores of survivors of clergy abuse — people who had spent decades trying to escape the grief and trauma of childhood sex assault — have come forward over the past three years after deciding now is finally the time to seek justice.
At least 130 — likely many more, attorneys say — have filed or will file lawsuits against the Santa Rosa Roman Catholic Diocese during a special three-year window that allows adults of any age to file personal injury cases for childhood sex abuse in California. That window closes on New Year’s Eve.
But none of those cases is likely to go to trial.
The diocese announced to the court Nov. 30 that it would seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early next year, a move that will suspend state court proceedings and leave the whole matter in federal bankruptcy court.
In effect, experts and plaintiffs attorneys say, that means the judicial process becomes less about finding the truth in each case and holding those in power to account for decades of horrific abuse and more about assigning dollars and cents.
The priority under Chapter 11 reorganization is the well-being of the church and its ability to carry on while the abused become just more creditors, “fighting for the same dollar” as, say, a roofer or any other vendor, said Professor Marci Hamilton. She is the longtime senior fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania and founder and chief executive officer of CHILD USA, a nonprofit think take dedicated to protecting children from abuse.
“The truth-seeking function of filing a lawsuit is sidelined, and the only issue that winds up being part of the discussion is, ‘How much money can we, the debtor, save by filing for bankruptcy?’ ” she said.
Assessing the claims, San Franciscoplaintiffs attorney Mary Alexander said, also becomes a function of categorizing and counting different kinds of abuse “rather than actual harm,” and overall seeing “a huge case” turn “into a little tiny settlement.”
It’s also “taking away from their ability to find out what really happened — who at the church was responsible or at the school — and in exchange for a two-to-three-year delay and for far less money,” Alexander said. “And it’s still going to be the insurance companies that are paying.”
Months, likely years, will soon be spent fully assessing church assets and vetting claims to determine how church funds should be divided among the survivors.
Attorney Adrienne Moran, whose Santa Rosa law firm has long represented the Santa Rosa Diocese, said bankruptcy is a way to make sure whoever is first in the door doesn’t take everything and leave nothing for the rest.
“The purpose of filing for the bankruptcy is really to make sure that all of the survivors get a fair and equitable settlement,” Moran said, “and to ensure that Plaintiff No. 1, who might go to trial, doesn’t get all of the reward and then leave nothing for the remainder of the survivors.”
Santa Rosa Bishop Robert Vasa said the diocese really had no choice, given what he said were limited diocesan assets and “the overwhelming number of sexual abuse lawsuits filed against the diocese.”
Bankruptcy additionally would short-circuit the 2019 state legislation that expanded the time for survivors of childhood sexual assault to file civil cases.
Previously, child sex abuse survivors could file suit in California until they turned 26. The 2019 legislation, AB-218, raised the age cap to 40 and opened the three-year window for those 40 and older to file suits for childhood abuse.
But bankruptcy is a federal court proceeding, which supersedes state law, and would foreclose future claims for actions that occurred before the bankruptcy.
That means no one, even those under 40, would ever be able to sue the diocese again for past abuse, attorneys said.
“I’m sure that’s part of the reason they’re going into bankruptcy,” said Rick Simons, an East Bay plaintiffs attorney, who serves as liaison counsel for the Northern California cases generated by the three-year window, all of which are being coordinated through the Alameda County Superior Court.
“One thing the bishop wants to avoid,” said Sacramento attorney Joseph George Jr., “is to get sued two years from now and four years from now and seven years from now. They want to end this.”
The diocese, which runs from Petaluma to the Oregon border and includes 41 parishes and more than 178,000 parishioners, already had paid out more than $33 million in clergy abuse claims over the past three decades, some of it paid through insurance.
