The Archdiocese of Santa Fe will pay $121 million in compensation to victims of sexual abuse

Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester at the bankruptcy announcement in November 2018. Susan Montoya Bryan (AP)

The Archdiocese of Santa Fe, one of the oldest in the United States, reached an agreement with hundreds of victims of sexual abuse.

The New Mexico Catholic Church has faced hundreds of “credible” accusations for years that 74 of its priests committed crimes of pederasty in parishes or schools run by the diocese.

The accumulation of complaints bordered the Catholic organization to bankruptcy.

To avoid it, the religious have promised the payment of 121.5 million dollars to compensate 375 whistleblowers of crimes that occurred more than 25 years ago.

This is one of the largest judicial agreements reached in the country recently.

“No amount can undo the pain and trauma of our clients and families.

We hope that this agreement can close the wounds of some of the survivors of abuse”, said Dan Fasey, the lawyer who has represented since 2018 some of the families who went to court to uncover the scandal.

Since then, the diocese has spent $52 million in settlements with victims to prevent cases from going to trial.

The diocese has described the agreement as “very positive news”, which allows it to avoid

, the financial restructuring procedure.

“The Church takes its responsibility to ensure that victims of sexual abuse are fairly compensated very seriously,” John Wester, the Archbishop of Santa Fe, said Tuesday, the day the settlement was unveiled.

This has yet to receive the yes of the victims.

Compensation to those affected will come from the money of the archdiocese, parish budgets, other Catholic entities and Church insurance companies.

Although the payment represents a financial sacrifice for some of the parishes, the contribution is a sacrifice that shields them from future lawsuits, the organization has assured.

The archbishop explained that the money will reach the victims of abuse in full and that no dollar will be used to pay for lawyers or for the bankruptcy process.

These will be covered in another way.

The negotiation between the parties was coordinated by a committee of creditors that was formed in 2018, when the archdiocese began the financial restructuring process.

Charles Paez, the president of the committee, has informed that the agreement also contemplates a non-monetary part.

This forces the Catholic Church to create a public archive with documents that tell the story of abuse of the more than 70 religious involved in the scandal.

There will also be religious services and meetings with survivors.

"The archdiocese hopes that these positive steps can help heal victims of abuse and the community," says the statement signed in Albuquerque.

The archdiocese has its origins in 1850, when Pope Pius IX created a vicariate in the region.

25 years later it was elevated to archdiocese.

It is one of the largest in the American West, covering 158,000 square kilometers in 19 New Mexico counties.

For several decades, those responsible covered up hundreds of abuses committed by the priests in charge of parishes and churches.

In June 2019, when the window to sue the church for cases of pederasty closed, the courts were flooded with almost 400 complaints in an entity with only two million inhabitants.

"The number of complaints received speaks to the intensity of the crisis that New Mexico experienced," Levi Monagle, one of the victims' attorneys, said at the time.

“This diocese has become saturated with abusive priests in the last four or five decades,” he noted.

The organization published a few years ago a list with the names of the priests identified, several of them dead, and the places where they had officiated.

The archdiocese says it has had a zero-tolerance policy for abuse for 25 years.

This protocol to protect children and youth requires a background check of all employees of the Catholic organization and the obligation to take courses on safe environments for Catholic youth.

The churches of Portland (Oregon), San Diego (California) or Milwaukee (Wisconsin) have also suffered class action lawsuits such as the one in Santa Fe. In 2007, the Catholics of Los Angeles signed an agreement to pay almost 500 million dollars to compensate half a thousand victims of abuse.

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