Word: bishopate
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...pedophile drain on Catholic coffers already is estimated to top $1 billion nationwide. Maine's church spent nearly $1 million to cover up past abuse allegations and is bracing for fresh claims against the two Portland priests. When Florida's Bishop of Palm Beach Anthony O'Connell resigned March 10, after revelations that he had fondled a student 25 years ago, church officials disclosed that they had handed the victim $125,000 to quash a lawsuit in 1996. In the past decade, four dioceses (see chart) have laid out $96.2 million in settlements. And these are only the ones that...
...Boston's. Commercial insurers have recently started to balk at paying claims if they can prove church officials knew about the abuse and failed to stop it. Most dioceses also insure themselves through a Catholic self-help pool to which they contribute healthy annual premiums. Sometimes nicknamed "the Bishop's Program," this extra insurance often provides the cash payments that church authorities use to conceal their priests' wrongdoings...
...gorman is suing the Pope. Although his allegations of abuse against Father Sean Fortune led to legal proceedings against the priest on 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and sodomy, O'Gorman has yet to receive an apology from the Catholic Church. He is also suing Fortune's bishop, Father Brendan Comiskey, who was reportedly first informed about allegations against the priest in the early 1980s, but nevertheless allowed him to continue to minister in the southern Irish town of Fethard...
...common with many other abuse cases, the church seemed unwilling to take action against one of its own. However, in a landmark case in France last year, Father Pierre Pican, Bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux, received a three-month suspended sentence for failing to inform the police after Father René Bissey confessed to him that he was sexually abusing children. Bissey was jailed for 18 years in 2000 for raping one boy repeatedly and abusing 10 others betwen 1989 and 1996. Pican's defense claimed that the bishop had been motivated by his priestly obligation to keep Bissey's remarks...
...abusing clergy that has stored up problems for the church. In the case of Fortune, a BBC TV program last week alleged that he was abusing boys over a 20-year period, a situation that was so widely known that his parishioners complained about his predatory behavior to Bishop Comiskey's predecessor, Bishop Herlihey, as well as to the Vatican's ambassador to Ireland, the Papal Nuncio, and ultimately to the Vatican itself. The only result was that Fortune was moved from one parish and then sent off to study media communications in London and to seek psychiatric help...