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The Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Friday, less than 48 hours before a new Maryland law will end the statute of limitations for sexual abuse victims to sue the church and other institutions.
The bankruptcy filing will halt all lawsuits against the church, with those claims now being handled by the bankruptcy court.
The Child Victims Act of 2023, which allows victims of sexual abuse to file claims against institutions that harbored sexual abuse perpetrators no matter when the abuse happened, takes effect Sunday.
Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori said in a statement the new law would subject the nation’s first Roman Catholic diocese to “a great number of lawsuits of historic cases of child sexual abuse that were previously barred by Maryland law.”
Archbishop Lori said the bankruptcy filing was “the best path forward” to make sure all victims receive “equitable” compensation, “given the Archdiocese’s limited financial resources” that open-ended litigation would threaten.
“Staggering legal fees and large settlements or jury awards for a few victim-survivors would have depleted our financial resources, leaving the vast majority of victim-survivors without compensation while ending ministries that families across Maryland rely on for material and spiritual support,” he said.
The Chapter 11 petition filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court says the archdiocese estimates that it has between 1,000 and 5,000 creditors. The archdiocese lists its estimated assets at between just over $100 million and $500 million, and its estimated liabilities at between a little over $500 million and $1 billion. A list of creditors includes 685 survivors of sexual abuse.
Maryland lawmakers passed the law in April, weeks after the state attorney general released a nearly 500-page investigative report detailing the scope of child sexual abuse and cover-up within the nation’s oldest Catholic diocese. The report lists more than 150 clergy who were credibly accused of abusing over 600 victims dating back several decades.
The archbishop said the court-supervised reorganization will take several years, with a bankruptcy court accepting claims from abuse victims “for a specified period of time.”
A spokesman said the archdiocese had no comment beyond Archbishop Lori’s statement.
The Baltimore Archdiocese’s bankruptcy filing follows dozens of other dioceses around the country that have filed for bankruptcy since the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal came to light in the early 2000s.
The bankruptcy’s potential to limit future lawsuits drew an angry response from a sexual abuse victim and a victim’s rights attorney.
“The average person comes forward, the average child sexual abuse survivor comes forward at an average age of 52 years,” said David Lorenz, Maryland director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. “That means somebody who’s right now in their 30s or their 40s [who] was abused when they’re 7 will effectively be locked out by the time they’re ready” to file a claim, he said in an interview.
He dismissed the archdiocese’s claims of potential financial ruin under the new Maryland law, saying that awards were capped at $1.5 million per victim.
“There were 600 children in that report,” said Mr. Lorenz, who said he was sexually abused as a youngster in Kentucky. “That means if everybody got one and a half million dollars that would come out to $900 million. We know the church probably has billions of dollars in real estate assets. They can afford $900 million.”
Attorney Teresa Lancaster, who said she was a sexual abuse victim at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore in the early 1970s, called the filing “premature” since no lawsuits have been filed under the new law.
“This bankruptcy will make survivors have to wait for justice,” she said in an email. “We have waited long enough. The act was passed to provide justice for survivors. The church has spent millions of dollars on lawyers and lobbyists to prevent survivors from having their day in court. They protect predators.”
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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