Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles settles sex abuse cases for $880 million

It's been called the "largest single child sex abuse settlement" an Archdiocese has ever made

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In a decision that’s been called the “largest single child sex abuse settlement with a Catholic archdiocese” so far, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay out over $880 million to 1,353 survivors of the Catholic Church.

It’s the result of months of negotiation and should close the door on the abuse lawsuits that have rattled the Archdiocese for more than two decades.

Attorneys in the Plaintiffs’ Liaison Committee said in a joint statement, “While there is no amount of money that can replace what was taken from these 1,353 brave individuals who have suffered in silence for decades, there is justice in accountability.”

While basic math tells us each survivor stands to receive over $650,000, the exact amounts will be decided by a separate process that doesn’t involve the Archdiocese.

All of this comes after the same Archdiocese paid out over $660 million to cover 500 people in 2007. By 2014, the total had come to $740 million (including the earlier amount). There was a separate $8 million payout in 2019 to a teenager who was abused by the athletic director at her Catholic high school. And there were other individual settlements the Archdiocese made over the past year. So why are they paying even more now?

For that, we can thank California lawmakers.

In 2019, the state legislature passed a bill (Assembly Bill 218) opening up a three-year window for adults to file lawsuits relating to childhood sexual abuse if, in the past, they had been locked out from doing so due to existing statutes of limitations. The bill allowed people as old as 40 to file sexual abuse cases (instead of the previous cap of 26) and allowed people older than that to file similar lawsuits up to five years after they “discovered that the psychological injury or illness… was caused by sexual assault” since it’s not always obvious at the time of the incident(s). It also allowed for “triple damages” to be paid out if the abuse involved a “cover-up” of earlier assaults.

Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez argued that the law was unconstitutional. He lost that battle, thankfully, and the window was open between 2020 and 2022. During that time, about 4,000 claims were filed in California, including roughly 1,900 against the LA Archdiocese.

Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez (screenshot via YouTube)

In announcing the settlement, the Archdiocese said none of the claims involved current priests. (There were some allegations made against current ones, but the Archdiocese said they were not substantiated “based on the information available during the investigation.”) They also explained where the money would be coming from:

Archbishop Gomez said the archdiocese would fund its settlement through a combination of archdiocesan reserves and other assets, as well as loans and payments that can be expected from other parties named in the lawsuits, like religious orders. 

The archbishop stressed that no funds would be used from parishes or school donations or archdiocesan-wide collections and campaigns like Together in Mission and Called to Renew.

So they’re taking a giant chunk of money from an already-deep money pit that won’t affect the most outward-facing elements of the Church. Fine. Whatever works. None of these payouts means the LA Archdiocese is filing for bankruptcy, though, unlike many other places:

In California, the fallout from AB 218 was cited in recent bankruptcy announcements by other Catholic dioceses, including Fresno, Oakland, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, San Diego, and the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

In the case of Los Angeles, the largest Catholic archdiocese in the country and one of the largest worldwide, archdiocesan officials indicated that a bankruptcy filing was not a financially sound solution.

Gomez issued a perfunctory apology to all the child rape survivors:

I am sorry for every one of these incidents, from the bottom of my heart. My hope is that this settlement will provide some measure of healing for what these men and women have suffered.

I’m not saying he’s not sincere about that. Gomez has had to clean up a lot of the mess left behind from his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, who actively tried to conceal sex abuse cases from law enforcement officials. Part of the new settlement involves the Archdiocese releasing files that documented the abuse.

While the settlement will hopefully provide some kind of closure for survivors, in many ways, this lets the Catholic Church off easy. Asking a rich man to pay a fine doesn’t really change his life, and asking the Archdiocese to pay hundreds of millions of dollars still leaves it with plenty to spare. As for hurting its reputation, well, it’s not like they had much of one to begin with.

No one’s going to jail either. The churches and Catholic schools in the Archdiocese will still exist when all this is over. Still, the settlement represents more accountability than the survivors would’ve seen if Church leaders got their way. They did everything in their power to block the look-back window from becoming law and then they did everything they could to limit the damage on themselves.

The only reason the survivors will now receive at least some kind of justice is because a secular government took the moral high road despite plenty of religious opposition.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article included incorrect numbers for the payouts. They have been fixed in this version.]

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