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THE settlement for $660m (€480m) made by the Roman Catholic Church in the arch-diocese of California is another hard stepping stone along what would be called by the victims the road of retribution for the church, and, by the church, the bridge towards reconciliation.
If it is reconciliation, then the church fought long and hard to avoid that conclusion, adding massively to the suffering, the doubt and uncertainty, and the damage of those who now benefit. There are 500 victims and over 200 accused, in both cases a percentage of the real level of abuse and damage; moreover, the settlement came only the day before the first of their cases was to come to court.
So much for the healing and harmonizing implicit in the normal motive to reconcile. As the lawyer acting for the abused said, in response to the agreement, "some of the victims have waited more than five decades".
A second important achievement in the arch-diocese was the legal one. A judge ruled against the church and in favour of making public the confidential files on the priests accused, even if the accusations have not led to prosecution or financial settlement in lieu of prosecution.
What he said is important in the Irish context: "The rights of privacy must give way to the state's interest in protecting its children from sexual abuse." Settlement without transparency was a form of safe haven for the abuser, terminating scrutiny. Its parallel would be the degree to which those in high office in the Roman Catholic Church have been guilty of protecting the religious by shifting them around, thus multiplying the incidence of abuse.
The archbishop, Roger Mahony, was responsible for the secrecy and protection and he acted in making the $660m settlement in order to avoid being brought before the courts. There he would have been confronted with his protection of abusing priests by moving them, thus letting them continue to abuse. He also refused access to private files on priests and Brothers against whom allegations were made. After a long career involving him in evasion and defence of a culture of abuse, he now says all is changed.
The Los Angeles settlement is the biggest in the US but needs to be set against church wealth in the archdiocese reckoned in billions - as well as against the other capitulations by the church in Canada and elsewhere, but perhaps most notably in Boston.
Six years ago, in June 2001, Cardinal Law, for many years the archbishop of Boston, admitted, in a routine court filing, that he had protected a priest, John Geoghan, although he had been told, two months earlier, of abuse allegations. Over 34 years, two cardinals and many bishops had failed to place children out of his reach while they sent him compassionate letters and moved him from parish to parish, where he left a trail of victims in his wake.
The 'Boston Globe' took up the story. It was a new story, not the predictable one of a priest molesting children; plenty of those had occurred and had usually ended in private settlements without police prosecutions. What was new was the bishop's protection of the perpetrator as well as the secrecy of all the civil actions. For whatever reason, the judges impounded the case documents and the public knew nothing of the filing and resolution of cases. This happened with Geoghan; his personal records, the depositions made by plaintiffs and all other documents were sealed.
The 'Boston Globe' challenged this and won. The church appealed it to the Massachusetts Appeals Court and lost. Cardinal Law's lawyer threatened the 'Boston Globe' with legal sanctions, but the newspaper pushed ahead anyway. The newspaper focused on the first criminal trial involving Geoghan and found, in the process of investigation, seriously incriminating material. This included warnings going back almost twenty years about Geoghan's victims. These showed that, at the highest level, the church had known and ignored his trail of desolation and wrecked lives.
The archdiocese capitulated and turned over a mass of documentation dealing with at least seventy priests who had been accused of abuse. Other dioceses in the US followed suit. For the first time the American Conference of Catholic Bishops began preparing a national policy.
The story is far from over. Los Angeles is, as stated above, a stepping-stone. And, quite rightly, there has been extensive coverage in the press here and on radio and television. What has not been covered, indeed hardly alluded to at all, is the wide gulf between the US and Ireland.
Here, the climate of secrecy prevails. Despite eight years of investigation, the Sean Ryan Commission, funded by the State, has come up with less than the 'Spotlight Team' on the 'Boston Globe', consisting of four journalists, managed in a matter of months. Here, the state legal system has failed to properly arbitrate between the abused and the collective diocesan and church system that facilitated the abuse.
A great deal of the abuse was much worse than in the US, and for that matter Canada and other jurisdictions as well. In May 1999, Bertie Ahern talked of the victims of abuse in the industrial schools being "trapped in frightful isolation". But instead of passing laws and creating church-state agreements to bring reconciliation, he did the reverse. He struck what Roisin Shortall of the Labour Party called "a bargain-basement deal". The secrecy is intact. The money remains with the church. The victims are bewildered, angry, confused and, at heart, furious. The settlement payments have been ridiculously low, almost without exception - to judge from the information that has been given, against enforced agreement not to disclose, in the Redress Board hearings.
A secret deal or covert agreement between church and State, fully backed throu-ghout the long, unhappy process of the past eight years, has turned on its head the impressive alternative stories that have come out of Boston and Los Angeles. Immense damage has been done to many.
There is no reconciliation. The whole process, dressed up as healing and repairing, has been nothing of the sort. And very few people, reading about the Los Angeles settlement, even see the huge gulf that exists between us and the rest of the world.