Rockville Centre, New York, diocese files for bankruptcy amid sex abuse lawsuits

A Roman Catholic diocese on New York’s Long Island filed for bankruptcy Thursday — the fourth diocese in the state to do so since authorities extended the statute of limitation on sex abuse cases last year.

“In the year since the passage of the Child Victim’s Act, more than 200 lawsuits alleging sexual abuse have been filed against the diocese,” Rockville Centre Bishop John Barres said Thursday in a video. “What became clear was that the diocese was not going to be a blessing to carry out its spiritual, charitable, and educational missions if it were to continue to shoulder the increasingly heavy burden of litigation expenses associated with these cases.”

Jeff Anderson, an attorney who represents sex abuse victims, said the bankruptcy declaration was just ploy for the Diocese of Rockville Centre to avoid paying victims’ higher damages. In a press conference Thursday, he accused the diocese of “under-representing” assets, including “massive amounts of real estate.”

“Like their recent attacks on the Child Victims Act and their efforts to intimidate survivors from coming forward, we see the Diocese’s decision to declare bankruptcy as strategic, cowardly and wholly self-serving,” Mr. Anderson said.

The diocese, one of the nation’s largest, said in papers filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York that it serves 1.4 million baptized Catholics on Long Island. The diocese also claimed $200 million in assets and $100 in liabilities.

Rockville Centre’s bankruptcy petitions follow bankruptcy declarations by dioceses in Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester. Last month, a state judge refused to throw out child sex abuse lawsuits filed against Rockville Centre.

Meanwhile, a victims’ rights group in Philadelphia on Thursday published a report that the church’s plans to end child sex abuse by clergy insufficient, saying individual prevention policies among the nation’s 32 archdioceses do not reach a “gold standard.”

However, when the better practices of all the archdioceses’ are pooled, “such a standard begins to take form,” says the CHILD USA report.

The report links various legal settlements between victims and local administrators of the Catholic church to a “hodgepodge” of child protection policies, including a toll-free phone number in Los Angeles, a “safe touch” educational campaign in Indianapolis and a whistleblower policy in Davenport, Iowa.

“States and local civil jurisdictions may have different reporting requirements and diocese may have different population needs,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told The Associated Press. “Thus, a one-size-fits-all approach is less effective than principles that can be applied and adapted locally.”

The bishops’ conference itself came under fire in Thursday’s report. Investigators for Child USA noted a grand jury found 37 credibly accused priests were still “openly working in the [Philadelphia] Archdiocese,” even after the archdiocese passed an audit by the conference’s Charter for the Protection of Children and Youth, a protocol established by bishops in 2002.

“The archdiocesan response to those reports and the lessons learned from them is not relegated to any one statement,” Archdiocese of Philadelphia spokesman Ken Gavin told The Washington Times. “Rather, the response is a comprehensive and ongoing one that seeks to prevent abuse from taking place and to assist survivors and their families on the path to healing.”

More than two dozen dioceses have filed bankruptcy petitions since the beginning of the church’s sex abuse scandal nearly two decades ago.

In Rockville Centre, Bishop Barres said the diocese had paid out more than $60 million to 350 survivors. He maintained that the decision to ask a court to restructure diocesan finances will enable payment of “equitable” damages.

Documents filed with the bankruptcy court on Thursday show that COVID-19 and social distancing restrictions led to smaller offertory collections at the 135 parishes on Long Island since March. During Holy Week, the diocese says it garnered $363,000 — or 40% of last year’s collection — from charitable giving.