Insurer to Catholic Archdiocese of New York: We don’t cover cover-ups
Decades of concealed clergy abuse are coming back to haunt the Archdiocese of New York
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In what sounds like a joke, but very much isn’t, the Archdiocese of New York says its insurance company won’t give it the money it needs to pay victims of child sexual abuse because the Catholic group has supposedly allowed “a pattern of abuse to persist for many years.”
You may have seen news article about recent settlements by archdioceses to settlement hundreds of lawsuits from survivors of abuse. The Archdiocese of New Orleans, for example, announced earlier this month that it would give about $305 million to roughly 600 survivors of clergy sexual abuse. (That particular group had already filed for bankruptcy as a way to limit their payouts.) \
Where was all this money coming from? The company Travelers, which insured the archdiocese between 1973 and 1989, when much of the abuse occurred.
The situation is somewhat different in New York, where they’re trying to raise $300 million to pay off settlements with about 1,300 victims. They’ve been selling buildings, laying off employees, and cutting administrative costs. But they still don’t have all the money they need, which is why they’re relying on their own insurer, Chubb, to pay off the rest. The Archdiocese argues Chubb has to do that; after all, wasn’t that the agreement they had with the company for decades before 2000 when most of these crimes were taking place?
Not so fast. The insurance company says it doesn’t have to pay this money at all because, in their view, the Archdiocese was violating the terms of their agreement by not doing enough to prevent ongoing crimes.
Consider this: If you have insurance for your home in case of a fire, but then you actively do things that make a fire in your home more likely, the insurance company may not have to pay out the costs if your home burns down because that was your fault. The contract the Archdiocese of New York had with Chubb covered accidents, like if a church bus hit pedestrians. But if a bunch of your vehicles have faulty wiring, and you know that, and you never take them in for repair, that’s on you.
That’s the argument the company is now making against the Catholic archdiocese when it comes to sexual abuse:
Chubb… accused the archdiocese of tolerating and covering up child sexual abuse for decades – and it called for more transparency, saying the archdiocese has refused to share “what they knew and when”.
“The insurance that the Archdiocese bought covers accidents – it does not provide compensation for knowingly allowing a pattern of abuse to persist for many years,” Chubb said in a statement. “There’s a reason insurance doesn’t cover this kind of behavior as it would reward those who facilitate criminal conduct rather than those who take vigilant steps to mitigate risk and protect children from abuse.”
That… makes perfect sense. What a damning indictment of the Catholic Church. You know things are bad for you when an insurance company is the voice of moral reason.
When the ultra-conservative Cardinal Timothy Dolan first raised this concern over a year ago, he told supporters that the Archdiocese of New York had paid Chubb over $2 billion (adjusted for inflation) over the decades—as if we should sympathize with the Church—before claiming the company was “attempting to evade their legal and moral contractual obligation to settle covered claims which would bring peace and healing to victim-survivors.” He explained that their insurance covered general liability, “including coverage for sexual misconduct claims.” (The archdiocese sued Chubb for deception and fraud. That case remains ongoing.)
Here’s Dolan:
In legal documents, Chubb has abandoned its archdiocese and parish policy holders and those people such policies were purchased to protect, the survivors of child sexual abuse. Chubb scurrilously claims that they are not obligated to settle claims because the abuse of victims was “expected or intended” by the Church. You read that right. They make the false argument that people like my beloved predecessors Cardinal Terence Cooke or Cardinal John O’Connor took actions with the intent of harming children, or at least expecting that would be the case. Outrageous!
Why would they make such an egregiously false claim? Easy. To protect their bottom line – one that currently brings in $2 billion per quarter. Their apparent plan, which other Chubb insured have fallen victim to – see the bankrupted Archdiocese of San Francisco, for instance — is designed to delay, delay, and further delay, hoping to force the archdiocese to pay the claims Chubb is legally responsible for paying but has refused to pay. A sad story!
If Catholic leaders are looking the other way while abuse occurs under their purview, or they refuse to take any meaningful action to end sexual abuse (which plenty of reporting over the decades has confirmed time and time again), then no one should be surprised when abuse continues to occur. So, yes, those Catholic leaders allowed abuse to go on and it’s reasonable to expect crimes would occur because this is the Catholic Church, an institution with decades of experience harboring sex predators.
All of this infuriated Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, a man who has a perpetual aneurysm whenever the Catholic Church is fairly criticized.
Chubb’s position is morally indefensible and legally spurious. It is not only feeding anti-Catholicism, it is making mince meat out of its purported interest in standing by its promises. It is just as preposterous to argue that it is “delivering exceptional insurance coverage and service,” paying its claims “fairly and quickly.” Just the opposite is true.
It is one thing for an insurance company to balk on its financial commitments; it is quite another when it imputes vile motives to its carriers, and this is doubly true when it is aimed at the Catholic Church. Its credibility is shot.
…
Chubb has said that it is not obligated to settle claims against the archdiocese because the abuse of victims was “expected or intended.” This is an outrageous lie. Indeed, it intentionally maligns Cardinal Dolan’s predecessors, effectively saying that people like Cardinal John O’Connor deliberately intended to harm children. That would make them evil.
Donohue is so close to getting it…
It’s not anti-Catholic to point out how the institution is a hotbed of abuse.
It’s fair to blame the Church for not preventing abuse because it hasn’t earned credibility in that regard.
And not doing everything in your power to end sexual abuse—like turning in predators instead of hiding behind the Seal of Confession, and letting law enforcement officials learn about allegations of sexual abuse, and not transferring priests accused of wrongdoing—makes you evil. It’s not complicated.
All Chubb has said is that it won’t “pay for any settlements that were the result of concealed criminal activities, including child abuse and the failure to stop it.” The company is open to paying these settlements, too, but they say they don’t have the information they need to see if the Church is upholding its end of the deal:
Chubb noted that in 2016, the ADNY [Archdiocese of New York] compensated 338 victims of clergy abuse more than $67 million in a settlement. Chubb said the ADNY paid millions of dollars to alleged victims of child sexual abuse, without the insurers’ knowledge or consent.
Chubb also alleged a lack [of] information and cooperation needed to evaluate the claims. The insurer said it requested but did not receive information from the ADNY about its policies and practices concerning the handling of allegations of sexual abuse by clergy, its knowledge of the scope and pervasiveness of sexual abuse by clergy, and other issues relevant to the ADNY’s requests for coverage. “All of the policies require the insured to cooperate with the insurer,” Chubb added.
I don’t know how this battle ends, and frankly, it doesn’t make a difference to me if the insurance company pays the money or the Archdiocese remains on the hook for it. That’s the cost of doing business with a criminal enterprise.
In any case, this whole episode is a moral collapse that’s a long time coming. The Archdiocese of New York didn’t have some lapse in judgment. It’s facing the consequences of treating sex abuse as a reputational problem to be managed rather than a crime to be stopped. When an insurance company can credibly argue that abuse was foreseeable precisely because Church leaders tolerated, concealed, and enabled it, that’s not “anti-Catholicism.” That’s accountability.
The Church has spent decades fighting with abuse victims, forcing them to spend years in court to get any kind of justice. Now they’re fighting with their own insurers because they can’t take full responsibility for something that was within their control. Even if no one wants to say the former Archdiocese leaders were active participants in the abuse, we can still argue they were negligent, willfully blind, and morally compromised.
In any other institution—including Donohue’s favorite punching bag, the public schools—this would be recognized as systemic failure. But at least public schools have ways to deal with alleged criminals that don’t involve transferring them to other schools.
It’s above my pay grade to say if Chubb’s position is legally coherent or even morally defensible in narrow terms. But let’s not forget what victims have to deal with here: They’re caught between a Church that enabled their abuse and a corporate system designed to minimize financial exposure. The problem isn’t that the survivors are asking for too much; it’s that two powerful institutions are doing battle to see how little they can pay out to those who suffered. Neither side wants to get stuck with the bill for decades of human damage.
All the more reason to keep pressure on all sides. Survivors deserve full compensation without delay. The Church should be forced to liquidate assets, disclose records, and accept the fact that its supposed moral authority isn’t going to be found through litigation.
"To protect their bottom line"
"designed to delay, delay, and further delay"
Two things the catholic church is good for. Jealous that your insurer may be better at it ?
“You know things are bad for you when an insurance company is the voice of moral reason.”
Zing! There’s a t-shirt here! Maybe even a carved granite monument.