The Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York – the largest organization of its kind in the US – is raising a $300m fund as it seeks to settle with about 1,300 survivors of clergy sexual abuse who have sued the church.
Some of the money involved comes from the New York archdiocese’s cutting costs and selling off assets after Catholic priests, deacons and lay workers worldwide sexually preyed on children for decades – with the abusers being protected by their superiors.
The New York archdiocese has laid off employees and reduced its operating budget by 10% in order to raise enough money to cover settlements for most, if not all, of the outstanding claims. It has also completed the more than $100m sale of its former headquarters on First Avenue in Manhattan and other real estate.
Furthermore, the archdiocese agreed to engage retired judge Daniel J Buckley as a mediator between itself and survivors to reach a settlement. Buckley played a similar role in negotiations between the archdiocese of Los Angeles and more than 1,000 people who accused its personnel of abuse, resulting in an $880m settlement in 2024.
With civil litigation against the archdiocese of New York due to come to trial in 2026, the archdiocese agreed to negotiate settlements over the next two months, said attorney Jeff Anderson. Anderson, who represents about 300 of the reported 1,311 survivors in New York with claims dating from 1952 to 2020, said settlements would have to be accompanied by full disclosure of wrongdoing and measures to prevent future abuse. “The time for reckoning is now, and it’s long past due,” he said.
In a statement, New York cardinal Timothy Dolan asked for “forgiveness for the failing of those who betrayed the trust placed in them by failing to provide for the safety of our young people”.
The announcement of the New York settlement negotiations came on the same day that officials revealed the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans and its insurers would pay $305m to about 600 abuse survivors of the clergy molestation scandal there.
The news in New Orleans – home to the US’s second-oldest Catholic archdiocese – came shortly after the church there gained judicial approval to settle the federal bankruptcy protection case it filed in 2020 because of clergy abuse claims there.
A payout of $300m, like the one being discussed in New York, would rank as one of the largest ever by a US archdiocese. The sum of the Los Angeles settlement in 2024 was record-setting.
The settlement on Monday in New Orleans was the second-highest for a Catholic church institution in the context of bankruptcy court. Neither the New York nor Los Angeles archdiocese have sought bankruptcy protection.
The New York archdiocese said its effort to compensate victims was “complicated” by its ongoing legal struggles with Chubb insurance companies, which it said has refused to pay sexual misconduct claims for policies that the church had taken out for decades before 2000.
Chubb in turn accused the archdiocese of tolerating and covering up child sexual abuse for decades – and it called for more transparency, saying the archdiocese has refused to share “what they knew and when”.
“The insurance that the Archdiocese bought covers accidents – it does not provide compensation for knowingly allowing a pattern of abuse to persist for many years,” Chubb said in a statement. “There’s a reason insurance doesn’t cover this kind of behavior as it would reward those who facilitate criminal conduct rather than those who take vigilant steps to mitigate risk and protect children from abuse.”
