‘This whole thing’s a farce’: New Orleans Catholic church sex abuse settlement brings anger and shock

Settlement disclosure documents that disgusted victims virtually from the outset detail how points would be assigned based on the nature of the abuse. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Survivors of child rape and other sexual abuse within New Orleans’s Roman Catholic archdiocese learned that $641,000 or so is the most they can individually get under a settlement approved in December to resolve a years-long bankruptcy protection case.

Those amounts were communicated in letters that hundreds of clergy abuse survivors participating in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy began receiving on Tuesday. The figures are well below a $2.4m jury verdict awarded to an unrelated Louisiana religious sexual abuse claimant in June 2025 after the state’s legislature temporarily eliminated filing deadlines for such cases.