Bill's Comment Page

Catholic church in US pulls out of agreement on compensation of paedophilia victims

The BBC (and other major news services) report that the finance council of the Catholic church in the archdiocese of Boston is pulling out of an agreement to compensate 86 alleged victims of paedophilia in the sex abuse scandal involving defrocked priest John Geoghan. The council cite the need to conserve funds to meet payments to other victims of paedophilia at the hands of Church personnel and which are likely to arise in future.

In this connection, Father Paul Shanley was arrested on Thursday in southern Califormia. He has waived his right to refuse extradition to Massachusetts.

What this will mean is that instead of the Church agreeing to out of court settlements, it may well be that major court cases against the Church and various former and current personnel will be undertaken.The Church is faced with a massive dilemna – continue to agree to out of court settlements which will quickly deplete the Church’s resources, or wait for alleged victims to commence legal proceedings and risk massive punitive awards being granted against it. One of the most despicable aspects of this latest development is that alleged victims will now likely be forced to submit to cross-examination in court if they wish to proceed with claims – what the Church seems to be hoping, I suspect, is that many of the alleged victims will not wish to face the trauma of re-living the abuse they suffered as children in court and will not proceed – my already low opinion of the Catholic Church and its monstrous attempts at a cover-up of this scandal has just fallen a good deal further.

The ‘head in the sand’ press releases issued by the Vatican after the visit of all US Cardinals to The Holy See recently (see earlier article) may well be rebounding on the Church even more quickly than I could have imagined.

The Church richly deserves whatever sanctions will flow from its past and present criminal misconduct.