Exposing the Church Scam: Catholic Churches Pay Compensation to Victims of Sexual Crimes — Read Details

Hundreds and thousands of cases relating to sexual abuse by Church authorities and even priests have come to light across the world. The frequency of such cases is huge. But what happens to these cases when they reach court?

This article deals with the answer to this question. We at Organiser tracked some of the cases from across the world, not just Bharat, where the Church was held accountable for buying the silence of the abuse victims. They spend hundreds and thousands to dismiss the case even before the court gets into it.

Before moving ahead, let us go through some cases of sexual abuse reported by Church workers and Nuns over the years, in India and abroad.

In Bharat

A village in Tamil Nadu outcasted a Christian man and his family for helping a sexual abuse victim file a complaint. The victim, a minor boy, was sexually abused by the local church priest. The man helped him file a complaint through Childline and since then he started receiving threats and lost business.

Notably, Arul Francis, a native of Sanarpatti in the Dindigul district, filed a petition with the district collector seeking action against those who outcast his family. Francis had helped a 7th-grade boy in his neighbourhood file a complaint against Adaikala Raj, the parish priest of Arogya Annai church. As per the details mentioned in his petition, the boy served as an altar boy in the local church and the priest was sexually assaulted.

In another case of sexual abuse of a minor by a Christian priest, Father Robin Vaddakumchiryil (48), a vicar of St Sebastian church (Syro-Malabar Catholic) in Kottiyoor, Kerala was arrested for the alleged rape of a minor which led to her pregnancy. The 17-year-old gave birth to a baby at a private hospital and the accused had shifted both the mother and the newborn to an orphanage in north Kerala’s Waynard to hush up the incident. The priest was arrested after the girl narrated the incident to officials of Childline, a telephone helpline for children in distress. Childline officials then tipped off the police.

Also, A Pentecostal pastor was arrested for sexually abusing a pregnant woman. She was raped by the pastor when she was a minor and underwent sexual harassment in many instances starting at the age of 14. The pastor was booked under the POCSO Act and was arrested while trying to escape.

Vinod Joshua (40), a native of Vellore, served as a pastor at the Blessings of Brotherhood church in Keezhakottai, Thoothukudi. He sexually abused a girl from Keezhakottai village in 2018. The girl regularly attended church for choir practice. She was raped when she was 14, and the abuse continued into her adulthood for 5 years. Pastor Joshua threatened her with murder to warn her against telling anyone.

The pastor was arrested under the POCSO Act as a result of a complaint the girl’s mother made against him. The charges were confirmed to be true by police after an investigation. He was arrested and lodged in jail, but later came out on bail.

The cardinal archbishop of Bombay, Oswald Gracias, who is one of Pope Francis’ closest advisors, has been confronted with pornographic pictures of nuns and teachers photographed by senior Indian priests.

Lay leaders from the Association of Concerned Catholics (AOCC), who obtained these pornographic pictures, confronted Gracias with the nude images on April 14 and threatened to release the photographs to the international media if the priests were not defrocked.

“Please be advised that all pictures of the nude nuns will be made viral,” AOCC leaders wrote in a follow-up email on April 29 to Gracias and 91 recipients.

Read a detailed report on this case by Organiser here. 

In the United States 

After reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents over six months, the Houston Chronicle found that 380 Southern Baptist pastors and church officials were accused of a myriad of sexual assault charges including everything from groping to rape.

The Houston Chronicle published a more than 5,000-word article in February 2019 – the first of three instalments – detailing the acts of sexual abuse by several prominent Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pastors and leaders on more than 700 victims over 20 years. The outlet noted that they took on this project in order to create a comprehensive list that details sexual abuse, assault and misconduct by SBC Church leaders after abuse victims demanded a list in 2007 and never got one.

According to the Houston Chronicle, since 1998, approximately 380 SBC leaders and volunteers “have faced allegations of sexual misconduct.” Of the 380 SBC leaders accused, 220 had been convicted, nearly 100 were in prison and more than 100 were registered sex offenders. While some leaders did serve jail time, the Houston Chronicle reported that others of them – some registered sex offenders – were working in SBC churches to date.

In France 

An investigation into sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church found that an estimated 216,000 children were victims of abuse at the hands of clergy since 1950, Jean-March Sauve, head of the commission that compiled the report, said in October 2021.

The scandal in France was the latest to hit the Roman Catholic Church, which had been rocked by sexual abuse scandals around the world, often involving children, over the past 20 years.

The commission was established by Catholic bishops in France at the end of 2018 to shed light on abuses and restore public confidence in the Church at a time of dwindling congregations. It has worked independently from the Church.

Sauve said at a public, online presentation of the report that the problem was still there. He added that the Church had until the decade of the 2000s showed complete indifference to victims. State prosecutors have been alerted about some of the cases the commission encountered.

The abuse was systemic, he said. The Church not only did not take the necessary measures to prevent abuse but also turned a blind eye, failing to report abuse and sometimes knowingly putting children in touch with predators.

Sauve said the commission itself had identified around 2,700 victims, but that a wide-ranging study by research and polling groups had estimated that there had been around 216,000 victims. The number could go up further to 330,000 when including abuse by lay members.

Portugal 

It is a well-established fact that sexual abuse of minors is rampant across churches in the world and the Catholic Church clergy, in particular, have been found guilty repeatedly by independent investigators. The independent commission, which published its report on February 13, 2022, spoke to more than 500 survivors.

The commission noted that it is mostly the Catholic church padres who have indulged in the sexual abuse of children since 1950. The commission, set up by the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, said that a minimum of 4815 children have been victims of sexual abuse over 70 years. The final report contained validated testimonies of sexual abuse from 1950 to 2022.

Pedro Strecht, the Commission’s coordinator and president, said that they received 564 testimonies of victims abused by padres or other church officials between 1950 and 2022 and out of these 512 testimonies have been validated. “The testimonies point to a much more extensive network of victims, calculated in a minimum, a very minimum number of 4815 victims. It is not possible to quantify the total number of crimes given that some victims were abused several times”, Strecht said at the press briefing.

The commission further stated that 25 cases have been handed over to public prosecutors while many others fell outside the statute of limitations. Also, the list of the abusers, who are alive and identified, would be sent to the Catholic Church and Judicial authorities by the end of February.

One of the important recommendations made in the report is that, in cases of alleged sexual abuse of minors, the existing provision for victims to be able to make a criminal complaint until the age of 25 should be raised to 30, even if the statute of limitation applies.

Settlements by Church in sexual abuse cases

In May 2023, Rev Foster P Rogers sexually abused a 15-year-old victim in his car in July 1979. Rogers, who belongs to New York’s Catholic Church, arrived at a settlement by paying 100 million dollars to the victim. Another settlement arrived at in May this year was by the Orleans Catholic Church which paid $1 million to the victim aged between 10 and 12 years. In this case, the victim was the child of a family friend of the accused Padre Wheeler. In exchange for not taking his case to trial, Wheeler agreed to serve five years of probation, avoid contact with the victim, and register as a sex offender for 15 years.

In May 2023, Tasmania’s Anglican Church arrived at a settlement with 16 victims of sexual abuse. A total of 6.5 million dollars was paid as a settlement. It must be highlighted that one of the victims, aged 11 to 15 years, was abused by three Anglican padres and a teacher.

In March 2023, Rochester Roman Catholic Church paid 7.6 million dollars. The Padres are accused of abusing 400 victims.

In August 2022, Harrisburg Roman Catholic Diocese paid a settlement amount of 12.7 million dollars to the 111 victims who were sexually abused by the padres. The settlement was made under the diocese’s independent survivor compensation program.

In July 2022, two cases of the settlement arrived. On July 7, New York’s Roman Catholic Church paid a compensation of 1 million dollars to 2 of Padre Mark Haight’s 400 victims. It is reported that despite knowing that Haight had abused many boys for decades, he was repeatedly relocated instead of being reported to the police.

On July 5, the Bishop’s Conference of Scotland paid 2.25 million pounds as a settlement to a boy who was abused in the 1970s when he attended a residential school in Scotland. The victim was 14 to 16 years old when the ‘spiritual’ director of the Scottish Seminary assaulted him 2 to 3 times a month in the dormitory bed.

In September 2018, the Brooklyn Roman Catholic Church paid 27.5 million dollars on 18 September 2018, for sexual abuse by its religious teachers. Four victims were subjected to sexual assaults in Brooklyn between 2003 and 2009 during an after-school program when they were aged between 8 and 12 years.

On May 19, 2007, the Youth Minister of the Long Island Roman Catholic Church paid hush money of 11.45 million dollars to victims who were repeatedly raped as teenagers in the 1990s. He had to pay 250,000 dollars annually to a woman for 12 years and 115,000 dollars to a man for the next 30 years who were his teen victims.

These cases are just the tip of an iceberg, there are hundreds of victim’s who have been silenced by the Church and many face legal action who dare to speak against the mishandling.

Instances where Church authorities apologised 

In a historic visit, Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, sets off on what he calls his “penitential pilgrimage” to apologise for the “evil” inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of Canada in the residential schools run by Roman Catholic religious orders of priests and nuns. This was the first apology by a Pope on Canadian soil, delivered to First Nations, Metis and Inuit people.

The scandals of the Catholic Church came to the fore in 2022 when the remains of 215 children at a former residential school in British Columbia in unmarked graves. Since then 1300 more such unmarked graves were found all over the country at the sites of the former schools.

These graves signified years of sufferings, in the form of sexual abuse, rape, starvation, physical and mental torture, cultural destruction and death of about 150,000 indigenous children who were separated from their families and brought to Catholic, residential schools as part of a policy of forced assimilation between the years 1881 and 1996.

Recognising these horrors Pope Francis spoke in his first address to the indigenous leaders along with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mary Simon, the country’s first Indigenous governor general and said “I am sorry”.

“Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the indigenous peoples. I am sorry,” he said. “In the face of this deplorable evil, the Church kneels before God and implores his forgiveness for the sins of her children.”

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” pleaded the pope, citing “cultural destruction” and the “physical, verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse” of children over the course of a century.

In a damning admission of sexual abuse of Nuns in the Church, Pope Francis has admitted that clerics have sexually abused nuns. He said in that case his predecessor, Pope Benedict, was forced to shut down an entire congregation of nuns who were being abused by priests and in one case they were kept as sex slaves.. The Pople of the Roman Catholic Church said the Church was attempting to address the problem but admitted that it was “still going on”.

Speaking to reporters while on a historic tour of the Middle East, the Pope admitted that the Church had an issue, and the roots lay in society “seeing women as second class”. He said that priests and bishops had abused nuns, but said the Church was aware of the “scandal” and was “working on it”, adding that a number of clerics had been suspended. Pope Francis said sexual abuse of nuns was an ongoing problem but happened largely in “certain congregations, predominantly new ones”.

A law firm, sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church in Munich did some crucial findings in their two year investigation. The accusations against Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in 2013, were that, for the period 1977-82, when he was archbishop of Munich and Freising. Pope Benedict XVI was aware of the sexual abuse cases in the church and did nothing to prevent it. He was specifically aware of at least four cases of sexual abuse when he was the archbishop of Munich but did not take any action against the accused.

This report is the first formal accusation that Pope Benedict XVI “failed to discipline abusive priests and allowed them to continue their ministry without expressed restrictions”.

The damning report details how an abusive pastor was transferred to Munich for therapy for pedophilia in January 1980, when Benedict was archbishop. Not only the Pope Benedict XVI did not take action against him, but also allowed the abusive pastor to return to pastoral work. In 1986, the abusive pastor was convicted of sexually abusing minors and given an 18-month suspended sentence with five years of probation.

In the last few decades, the church has been hit by multiple sexual abuses cases and how the office bearers at all the hierarchy did nothing to prevent it. In some cases, the laid down procedures even encouraged the abuse.