Forgive me Fodder for I Have Sinned

 

By Sandy McReynolds 

is sad that the Catholic Church, which has myriad good works and provides solace for millions, didn't see the writing on the wall in the 1950s and 1960s and start sanctioning, defrocking, and excommunicating "problematic" priests, deciding instead to protect, obfuscate, deny, and transfer the bad ones,  circling the wagons, so to speak, but it happened worldwide, so it appears to have approval from the upper echelons.

from bariweiss+the-big-read@substack.com:

The Next Clergy Sex Abuse Scandal Is Taking Place Right Now—in Bankruptcy Court

A Free Press investigation reveals how dozens of Catholic dioceses are subverting the Child Victim Act, stopping lawsuits in their tracks and pressuring victims to accept pennies on the dollar.

The first person to sue the Rockville Centre Catholic Diocese after the passage of New York’s Child Victims Act was a man named Richard Tollner. It was August 2019, and New York was one of seven states that had created a law giving sex abuse victims a limited window to bring lawsuits no matter how far in the past the abuse had taken place.

Tollner, who is now 66, said that he had been raped—and molested multiple times—by a priest, beginning when he was 15 at St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary, in Uniondale, New York. The priest, Monsignor Alan J. Placa, was the “dean of discipline” at the school on Long Island, where Tollner grew up. In 1977, when he was 17, he reported the alleged rape to several authority figures at the school, including the rector. But nothing happened.

 

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The Next Clergy Sex Abuse Scandal Is Taking Place Right Now—in Bankruptcy Court

A Free Press investigation reveals how dozens of Catholic dioceses are subverting the Child Victim Act, stopping lawsuits in their tracks and pressuring victims to accept pennies on the dollar.

 

“I couldn’t wait to sue,” said Richard Tollner, who says he was abused by a priest when he was a teenager. He led the effort to reach a settlement with the Rockville Centre diocese. (Cindy Schultz for The Free Press)

By Laurie P. Cohen

The first person to sue the Rockville Centre Catholic Diocese after the passage of New York’s Child Victims Act was a man named Richard Tollner. It was August 2019, and New York was one of seven states that had created a law giving sex abuse victims a limited window to bring lawsuits no matter how far in the past the abuse had taken place.

Tollner, who is now 66, said that he had been raped—and molested multiple times—by a priest, beginning when he was 15 at St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary, in Uniondale, New York. The priest, Monsignor Alan J. Placa, was the “dean of discipline” at the school on Long Island, where Tollner grew up. In 1977, when he was 17, he reported the alleged rape to several authority figures at the school, including the rector. But nothing happened.

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A quarter-century later, a Suffolk County grand jury investigated Placa as part of an extensive inquiry into clergy sexual abuse; he was said to have abused at least two others besides Tollner. Again, nothing happened; although the grand jury concluded that the diocese had protected at least 58 abusive priests, neither the diocese nor any individual priests were indicted. Placa, who has always denied the charges, was placed on administrative leave by the church, but was eventually cleared of the charges against him by the Vatican.

“I couldn’t wait to sue,” said Tollner, who had lobbied to get the new law passed—and whose lawsuit took aim at the diocese, the eighth largest in the country, overseeing 1.5 million Catholics as well as Placa.

Juries have proven highly sympathetic to sexual abuse victims, and Tollner’s lawsuit had the potential to bring him millions in compensation for what he had suffered. In a 2007 trial against the Rockville Centre diocese, a jury awarded $11.45 million in damages to a man and woman who were repeatedly raped by a youth minister as teenagers. In June 2025, a jury in New Orleans awarded close to $2.4 million to a man who was sexually abused when he was around 11 years old.

But Tollner never got the chance to argue his case before a jury. On October 1, 2020, with sexual abuse lawsuits piling up, the Rockville Centre diocese filed a “voluntary petition for reorganization” under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

“This decision was not made lightly,” said Bishop John O. Barres in a statement at the time. And perhaps that is true. But as a legal strategy it was a no-brainer, since its primary effect was to undermine the purpose of the Child Victims Act. Bankruptcy gave the diocese the upper hand, while the victims became creditors who will be lucky to get a fraction of what a jury might have awarded them.

As of July, 41 Catholic dioceses and religious orders have used Chapter 11 filings to deal with the decades of horrific crimes committed by thousands of priests. Those filings have stopped lawsuits in their tracks and forced victims to accept pennies on the dollar, a Free Press investigation has revealed. To put it bluntly, long after the Church looked the other way at clergy sexual abuse, it has now found another way to deprive the victims of justice: the bankruptcy courts.

It has long been standard practice for companies facing massive numbers of lawsuits—for manufacturing asbestos, say, or marketing OxyContin—to file for bankruptcy. A Chapter 11 filing does not require companies to be insolvent; they simply need to show “financial distress,” allowing them to restructure their debts while continuing to operate.

Chapter 11 shuts down all litigation, halting discovery, the process by which litigants gather documents and witness testimony to support their claims. It prevents additional lawsuits from being filed. It eliminates jury trials and instead shifts the ongoing cases to federal bankruptcy court, where any settlement requires a process of mediation between the bankrupt company’s lawyers and lawyers for the creditors. That mediation often takes years. Although additional claims can be made, they too are routed to the bankruptcy court, where claimants fill out standard claim forms rather than filing lawsuits.

Early on, said Marci Hamilton, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who represented abuse victims in many early clergy sex abuse cases, dioceses used some unorthodox defenses to wriggle out of their obligations to sexual abuse victims. “They argued that it was unconstitutional for them to have to provide discovery,” she recalled. “It was unconstitutional to interfere with any kind of exchange between a bishop and a priest. They called it the formation privilege. And they argued that you couldn’t punish them for doing nothing but forgiving. Because forgiveness was what their faith required.”

In court, recalled Hamilton, “I dismantled all those arguments.”

But when states began passing laws like the Child Victims Act—ultimately, 21 did so, as did the District of Columbia—many dioceses decided that their best course of action was to adopt the bankruptcy playbook.

“It was a brilliant tactic because the bankruptcy system makes it about saving the debtor,” Hamilton said. “So they were able to flip the lawsuits from the victims being at the center of it, to them being at the center. And the victims just became collateral damage.”