Reconciliation and compensation for abuse victims (and some liability protection for the church)

The current issue of The New Yorker includes an article by Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and an occasional Commonweal contributor, entitled "What do the Church's Victims Deserve?"  It looks at a new model that some church leaders are deploying to address sexual abuse victim claims - and to prepare dioceses for the lifting of statutes of limitations.

The approach, known as the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program (IRCP), is administered by attorneys Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros.  Elie describes them as arbitration and mediation experts with previous experience in compensating the victims of high-profile incidents, including the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  Cardinal Dolan of the New York diocese engaged them 2 1/2 years ago.  It was the start of a trend. According to Elie:

Feinberg and Biros subsequently established compensation programs in the Dioceses of Brooklyn (which includes Queens) and Rockville Centre (Long Island), and upstate, in the Dioceses of Syracuse and Ogdensburg. Their portfolio is expanding dramatically: five dioceses in Pennsylvania and all five dioceses in New Jersey have signed on, and multiple dioceses in Colorado and California are expected to do so later this year. Other I.R.C.P.s, which are similar to Feinberg and Biros’s template but are not under their supervision, have been established elsewhere, including the Dioceses of Buffalo, in New York, and Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania. Soon there will be Feinberg-branded I.R.C.P.s in the dioceses of two-fifths of American Catholics. His and Biros’s model for reconciliation and compensation is becoming the standard approach to priestly sexual abuse just as bishops worldwide are looking here for standard approaches.

How does it work?  Here's Elie:

When a diocese agrees to work with Feinberg and Biros, it sets aside a sum of money for compensation to survivors or indicates that it will pay claims as assessed. Biros evaluates each claim of abuse, taking into account the priest’s history and the quality of the claimant’s evidence that the abuse took place. A diocesan review board (usually made up of faithful Catholics in public life: judges, psychologists, law-enforcement officers) may also provide an assessment. If Biros approves the claim, she decides how much compensation to offer, weighing the nature of the abuse, how long it went on, how it affected the life of the claimant, and other factors. If the claimant accepts the offer, he or she relinquishes the right to sue the diocese [my emphasis - jp] but is not bound to confidentiality. “The program is not adjudicatory,” the archdiocese’s spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, told me. It doesn’t make any recommendations about measures against accused priests still in active ministry; it passes those claims to the diocese, which then conducts its own assessment and decides whether or not the priests should be disciplined or removed.

The results so far in the New York diocese:

Three hundred and ninety-four people applied. Biros accepted all but forty-eight claims. More than half the claimants were represented by counsel, such as Mitchell Garabedian, the lawyer who was featured in “Spotlight,” and a bitter foe of the Church. Only one declined the I.R.C.P.’s offer of compensation. Individual payments ranged from twenty-five thousand to five hundred thousand dollars. In total, the program awarded more than sixty-three million dollars to claimants, with little controversy.

So much for the Compensation.  What about Reconciliation?

In theory, by reviewing claims and setting compensation, I.R.C.P.s have freed the Church to take up reconciliation. In practice, Biros has done plenty of reconciling. Six decades after her own Catholic girlhood, in Brooklyn (“We were not particularly devout,” she says of her family), she has engaged personally with about two hundred claimants, either face to face, on the phone, or via Skype, doing the work of listening and reflecting that the bishops have struggled to perform credibly. 

“We hear it said that ‘all the cases are old cases,’ ” Feinberg said. “But there are sixty-five-year-old men sobbing in Camille’s office. These are people in damaged emotional states.” 

“Abuse at the hands of a priest was the defining experience of the Church in their lives,” Biros said. “Their families didn’t believe them. They find themselves questioning their sexuality, their self-worth. We see P.T.S.D. We see people who have attempted suicide.” In her view, this aspect of the I.R.C.P. model, in which claimants recount their experiences, is no small part of what it delivers. “The program is limited but beneficial,” she said. For the victims, “the benefit is the ability to tell two individuals what happened and for us to believe that they’re telling the truth. It says to the victims, ‘No more hiding. This happened. We believe you.’ ”

It seems clear that there is therapeutic value for victims in being able to tell their stories, even to lawyers who aren't the diocese but are contracted by the diocese.  Whether this amounts to actual reconciliation is another question; Elie plainly is skeptical on this point.  One of my very few criticisms of his article is that I wish he had elaborated more on his skepticism.

Elie also spends some time on the question of statutes of limitation being lifted.  I've opined here atNewGathering that the heightened interest by state attorneys general in church abuse is in service to victim advocates' goal of opening windows that currently are shut to victims of abuse from many years ago.  By compensating victims of cases that are too old to fall within the current statutory windows, while extracting promises from those victims not to sue should the window open wider, the IRCP approach reduces the church's liability should the windows be opened up.  If IRCP is all it is claimed to be, then it accomplishes this admittedly self-interested outcome for the church while also providing a measure of justice (in the form of a payout) and healing (in the form of sympathetic listeners from the church's contractors) for the victims. 

It's a highly readable article, written from the point of view of a practicing Catholic who also is a parent.  In one passage, Elie recounts the brushes he's had over the course of his life with priests who, it transpired then or later, were abusers of minors.  His recollections prompted me to assemble my own list of priests I've known who, later in life, were accused of abusing minors.  My tally is three; Elie's is longer.  And not all of his brushes were as benign as all of mine have been. 

There is much more besides what I am quoting and summarizing here.  I highly recommend the article.