N.J. dioceses establish fund for abuse victims
The Roman Catholic dioceses in New Jersey announced plans on Monday to establish a unified victims-compensation fund aimed at providing money to some people who were abused by clergy members as children.
“This is the first time we’re doing a statewide program using the same protocol and the same eligibility criteria,” said Camille Biros, who will administer the program and currently oversees similar ones in New York and Pennsylvania. “This is important news, and we’re looking forward to working with all the dioceses in the state.”
Details were still being finalized. People paid from the fund must sign a release saying they won’t sue the dioceses. The agreements would not include a confidentiality clause for victims, Ms. Biros said.
“Administrators of this program are bound by confidentiality,” she said, later adding: “But the claimant can speak to whomever they want . ... They can talk about the money; they can talk about the process.”
Such compensation funds have proven to be controversial. Some abuse victims view them as a path toward justice since they are barred from filing lawsuits by civil statutes of limitations.
Others view them more cynically, saying they represent the church’s effort to quash debate on bills designed to give older victims a temporary window to file time-barred claims and avoid potentially large financial payouts in the courts.
“In a very limited way, it’s a positive step for some,” said Mark Crawford, New Jersey state director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “But it should never be a replacement for what our legislators and our civil society need to do.”
The dioceses’ decision comes as legislators are grappling with whether to change New Jersey’s civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse, a move that could prove costly for the church. They also come weeks after New Jersey’s attorney general announced the first arrest by his Clergy Abuse Task Force, formed last year in the wake of a damning report in neighboring Pennsylvania.
The New Jersey fund, called the Independent Victim Compensation Program, is expected to launch later this year. Ms. Biros said she expects it to roll out in two phases: the first addressing victims who have already made claims with various dioceses, and the second aimed at working with new victims.
A “draft protocol” of the program will be published in the coming weeks at www.NJdiocesesIVCP.com, and people will have 30 days to submit comments. Then Ms. Biros and her colleague, Kenneth Feinberg, will finalize the terms and begin accepting claims.
They said payouts will be based on a number of factors, such as the age of the child, the nature of the abuse, the impact on a victim’s life, and whether drugs and alcohol were a factor. There “isn’t necessarily a cap” on payments, she said.
The pair also administer similar funds for dioceses in Pennsylvania and New York. They have received 85 claims in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and paid out more than $7 million to date there, Ms. Biros said. She said they had also received five or six complaints in Pittsburgh, where payments have not yet been made.
The decision to create the New Jersey fund comes at a time when public pressure is mounting across the globe on the Roman Catholic Church. Church officials were already grappling with scandals abroad when Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro released a report last year indicating that more than 300 “predator priests” had abused children and some in the church had worked to bury the allegations.
That sparked a flurry of activism in Pennsylvania, with abuse victims gathering in the Capitol to call for changes to the criminal and civil statute of limitations — measures that died last session.