Tuesday, April 9, 2019

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.

11 comments:

  1. Kenneth Feinberg knows reparations won't bring anyone everlasting joy. He knows that reparations, in size and shape, are going to be arbitrary no matter what you do. But, as an arbitrator, he usually convinces most people that the arbitrary reparations are fair as far as they go.

    Still, there is something in arbitrary but fair reparation that does not taste of the Gospel -- as Rita Ferrone, channeling Pope Francis, brings up in the context of this scandal in the current Commonweal. Listening to the stories is something that has more of the taste of the Gospel, and the Church was created to be about the Gospel. But the victims seem to trust the lawyers, more than the Church, to be listeners. From the Church they want something that tastes like justice but will settle for arbitrary fairness? That sounds backwards to me. As Rita implies, it is way past time for the ontological change that our leaders insist comes with ordination to become recognizable in practice.

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  2. Thanks for the link.

    I wonder if Elie is skeptical about the process because the church officials seem to have fobbed off the entire process on the lawyers to keep themselves from having to deal with it.

    Perhaps, like me, he is also repelled by a process that reduces the suffering of children to a monetary figure in hopes of quelling the bad press.

    What can't be quantified is the damage done to people who have lost their faith because of their treatment, who lost their ability to trust, and whose families branded them as liars.

    Even the monetary compensations can be construed as hush money.

    The Church has a terrible reputation right now making non-Catholics, and only time and contrite hearts are going to heal that.

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    1. Tom and Jean - regarding the limited "justice value" of payouts to victims - I agree with you. I spent quite a few years at the old dotCommonweal site criticizing the entire regimen (and industry) of victims suing the church, in part because a lump sum payout can't unwind the hurt and damage inflicted by men who are supposed to represent the church's message of love.

      I've also criticized the lawsuits because they necessarily put the victim and the church in an adversarial stance, putting the possibility of genuine reconciliation even farther out of reach.

      I've also criticized the lawsuits because funding the victim payouts punishes parties - the people of the diocese - who are not culpable for the abuse.

      Advocates of suing the church have replied that (a) no other method has been effective in getting the church authorities to own up to their responsibility and culpability; (b) it is healing for the victims to be able to tell their stories in depositions and in open court, and to see their abusers and the concealers of that abuse be called to account; and (c) the publicity generated by the lawsuits has induced other victims to come forward.

      In my view, this IRCP program does address (a), (b) and (c). And it does so while avoiding most/all of the downsides I've mentioned here.

      What would bring about genuine healing and reconciliation? I don't claim to be an expert on those topics, but it surely would include letting the victim tell his/her story, followed by an expression of contrition on the part of the church authorities. It may also include counseling and therapy for the victim. None of that is impossible. Dioceses (at least mine, and I believe many others) already offer to pay for therapy as a matter of course. As for listening and apologizing: I am certain that there are many priests and deacons who would gladly take that up. I'd do so with any victim who wishes to talk to me. Why doesn't it happen more often? Perhaps one reason is that it requires the victim to trust a representative of the same institution, another representative of which has ruined his/her life. I don't know how to bridge that gap, beyond stretching out a hand in love and friendship.

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    2. "What would bring about genuine healing and reconciliation?"

      I sure don't know.

      Going forward, a hard look at rule-bound clericalism might be a good idea.

      While not on par with sexual abuse, the whole top-down hierarchy has exacerbated the scandals, and has led many Catholics who have never been abused to leave the Church or to stop paying attention to its teaching authority.

      The Church must stop treating the laity like idiots. But I when read inaccurate and insulting explanations like this in the diocesan award-winning magazine, I do despair.

      https://faithmag.com/non-catholics-communion

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    3. Jean, the guy in your link with the salt shaker story lost me. He's trying to make the point that the Eucharist isn't just a symbol. However a symbol is exactly what his salt shaker is.

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    5. Don't get me started in the twaddle this guy spouts.

      He knows nothing about the range of teachings that Protestants have about the Eucharist. There are many ways to explain the "Catholics only" rule without resorting to that old chestnut that Protestants invariably desecrate the Host. I've seen or taken communion in many denominations, and, even where it is viewed as purely commemorative, the elements are treated with reverence.

      The attitude that "only Catholics do it right" is p perhap a factor in making the hierarchy unable to confront their own short-comings.

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    6. You are right about "...the range of teachings that Protestants have about the Eucharist." There is the school of thought of the Evangelical church my in-laws belonged to. They taught that it was a commemoration . But I never heard any of them say that it was "only" a commemoration . And a prerequisite for taking Communion was that you were "right with God". Sounds pretty much like the state of grace. And the Lutherans believe that it is the Body and Blood of Christ, but that it becomes so by the faith of the believer, when they receive it. And the LCMS have stricter rules than the Catholics about who receives.
      If people are going to talk about what other churches teach about the Eucharist, they need to inform themselves better.

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  3. My post crossed with Tom's. So, yah, what he said.

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  4. Read all 13 pages!..got to the last line set in a Brooklyn parish church: "I wanted to cry out--to say in a few words what happened here."

    God did not answer that prayer. The New Yorker did not grab the blue pencil..

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  5. Reparations must do some good, but the real need is for the Church to demonstrate that it has changed in how it responds to complaints and how it deals with the priests who are accused. As things stand, it’s easy to believe that abuse is still going on, unreported and unaddressed.

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