Pennsylvania a holdout

Even one of the biggest holdouts, Pennsylvania, may be moving closer to a window.

Pennsylvania’s landmark 2018 grand jury report disclosed a cover-up of hundreds of abuse cases over seven decades, and spurred many states to change their laws or begin similar investigations. Yet in the Pennsylvania Legislature top Senate Republicans, backed by bishops and insurers, blocked a window, saying it would be unconstitutional.

They offered instead the slower and less certain process of amending the state constitution, something that requires agreement by two consecutive legislative sessions and then the support of statewide voters.

Gov. Tom Wolf recently signed a related bill that gives future victims of child sex abuse more time to file lawsuits and ends time limits for police to file criminal charges. Meanwhile, the multiyear amendment process to open a window has begun.

Already, longtime clergy abuse lawyer Michael Pfau in Seattle says he’s signed up about 800 clients in New York, New Jersey and California. Boston’s Garabedian says he expects to file 225 in New York, plus at least 200 in a half-dozen other states. Another veteran abuse litigator, James Marsh, says he’s collected more than 200 clients in New York alone.

“A trickle becomes a stream becomes a flood,” Marsh said. “We’re sort of at the flood stage right now.”

Church leaders who lobbied statehouses for years against loosening statute of limitations laws say this is exactly the kind of feeding frenzy they were worried about. And some have bemoaned the difficulty of trying to counter accusations of abuse that happened so long ago that most witnesses have scattered and many of the accused priests are long dead.

“Dead people can’t defend themselves,” said Mark Chopko, former general counsel to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There is also no one there to be interviewed. If a diocese gets a claim that Father Smith abused somebody in 1947, and there is nothing in Father Smith’s file and there is no one to ask whether there is merit or not, the diocese is stuck.”