The Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg will launch a fund next year that will financially compensate victims of clergy sex abuse.
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Catholic dioceses of Pittsburgh, Scranton, Allentown and Erie said Thursday that they will set up similar compensation funds, the Associated Press reported. None of the dioceses, including Harrisburg, disclosed how much money would be put into the compensation funds.
In a statement from the Harrisburg diocese on Thursday, Bishop Ronald Gainer said the diocese was moving forward with its own program independent of other dioceses.
The program is slated to be operational early next year and will be led by attorney Kenneth Feinberg and associates, who administered the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund as well as a similar compensation fund for the Archdiocese of New York.
“In my name and in the name of the Diocesan Church of Harrisburg, I continue to express our profound sorrow and apologize to the survivors of child sex abuse, the Catholic faithful and the general public for the abuses that took place and for those Church officials who failed to protect children," Gainer said.
State investigators this year unearthed widespread clergy sex abuse in the Harrisburg Diocese and five other Catholic dioceses across the state. The grand jury investigation, led by the Office of Attorney General, found that over some seven decades, thousands of children had been sexually molested by priests, even as bishops and church officials turned a blind eye to the crimes.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who released the findings in August, has been able to prosecute only two priests. The vast majority of the cases fall outside the bounds of the statute of limitations.
Victims and victims advocates this year pressured lawmakers to reform the statute of limitations, specifically to install a retroactive window for victims timed out of the legal system. Those efforts have largely failed in the Legislature.
The federal government has launched its own investigation into the sexual abuse of minors by priests inside the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.
While some victims have welcomed the idea of a compensation fund, many say that such a program alone will not be sufficient to help them heal without the ability to seek legal recourse through a retroactive statute of limitation.
Since 2002, when the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston made headlines, Catholic dioceses across the country have increasingly entered into such agreements amid allegations that church leaders have helped to shield predators for years.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro this summer released the scathing findings of an 18-month grand jury investigation into clergy sex abuse across Pennsylvania.
Victims advocate state Rep. Mark Rozzi worries that a victims reparations program will leave out a sizable community of victims. The majority of victims of sexual abuse have nothing to do with Catholic clergy, he has said.
“We are shutting out so many other victims from seeking that same justice that clergy abuse victims would get," Rozzi said earlier this year.
Like most other compensation funds, Harrisburg Diocese’s fund would provide financial resources and other assistance to survivors. In its statement, diocesan officials noted that the financial resources for the program would not come from the money donated to local parishes and to the diocese by Catholic parishioners.
“We plan that the money for this program will come from our reserve, unrestricted Diocesan accounts and the yield from our Diocesan investments,” the statement said. “.We will also be working with our insurers who will be another source of these funds.”
Settlements from victims funds typically come nowhere near the compensation offered to victims out of court settlements. Victims, however, are typically open to the narrower criteria required by victims funds - including considerably lower levels of proof.
Gainer this summer ordered the removal of all names from buildings of his predecessors dating to 1947 for their failure to appropriately deal with the sexual abuse of minors at the hands of priests.