A person can refuse to sign the agreement and I will not participate in the program with them. On the other hand the Catholic Church maintains the confidentiality to a degree that violates the law, sensibility and reason. And we have proof that they do because priests who have abused have gone to confession and their activities have been known.
The settlement is for 112 million dollars! As deplorable as is the situation, I for one think this is ridiculous. I am fed up with bloated punitive damage awards. What this bloated settlement has insured is simply this. Others who have been harmed will not be compensated because THERE WILL NOT BE ANY MONEY. I believe the person harmed has a right to be compensated but settlements like this - which result in payments of tens of millions of dollars to layers are totally out of line. I believe a workman is worthy of his hire and that includes tort lawyers.
If the law firm could present an accounting that shows that their fee (about $38 million) is not more than three times the actual cost of the litigation, in this case their costs would have to be over $12 million, I would not question it. Contingent fee lawyers have to get good settlements on cases they in to stay in business. But tort roulette is just plain wrong. I have no idea what the jury was thinking. I hope this will be reduced to a more reasonable amount on appeal.
There is evidence that some of these cases of clergy abuse were brought to the civil authorities and they failed to carry out their duties for some reason. I am not familiar with the details of this one so this may not be the case. But let me cover that here. If it was there should be an investigation into how this failure was engineered. If it was just plain incompetence, that should be dealt with. On the other hand, if the charges were bought off by action of someone who interceded improperly with the authorities, that person and the civil authority who failed to carry out their duty should be held accountable. There are penalties for interfering with prosecution and malfeasance in office.
Finally, the practice of hiding the events and moving the priest to another parish is despicable. I have seen this done in Protestant circles in another way, the person was allowed to find a position with another church and nobody was advised there was a problem. After wreaking havoc in two churches the person is now in private industry. If the purpose was to salvage and rehabilitate the person more safeguards should have been put in place.
