Syracuse Catholic Church nears payments for 411 sex abuse survivors. The challenge: Who suffered most?
Syracuse, N.Y. — Dozens of people crowded into a courtroom this spring to reveal the lasting scars from childhood sex abuse by clergy and church employees in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse.
The diocese has organized a $176 million fund to compensate the abuse survivors. If it were divided evenly over 411 people with claims, after some lawyers get paid, each would receive as much as $400,000.
But it won’t work that way. Instead, a court-managed process will try to calculate a way to give the most money to the people hurt the worst.
This will turn the years of pain for each of the hundreds of abuse survivors into a specific cold, hard number.
How were you abused? For how long? Where did it happen? How have you coped with it over decades?
All these elements of shattered lives, and more, will be fed into a point system that ultimately decides a survivor’s compensation.
The bankruptcy of the Archdiocese of New Orleans shows how it can work. Sexual penetration equals 75 points. Oral sex is 56 points. Taking and publishing a video of the abuse is 20 points. Over the clothes or under the clothes?
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/08/sy...-most.html
Syracuse, N.Y. — Dozens of people crowded into a courtroom this spring to reveal the lasting scars from childhood sex abuse by clergy and church employees in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse.
The diocese has organized a $176 million fund to compensate the abuse survivors. If it were divided evenly over 411 people with claims, after some lawyers get paid, each would receive as much as $400,000.
But it won’t work that way. Instead, a court-managed process will try to calculate a way to give the most money to the people hurt the worst.
This will turn the years of pain for each of the hundreds of abuse survivors into a specific cold, hard number.
How were you abused? For how long? Where did it happen? How have you coped with it over decades?
All these elements of shattered lives, and more, will be fed into a point system that ultimately decides a survivor’s compensation.
The bankruptcy of the Archdiocese of New Orleans shows how it can work. Sexual penetration equals 75 points. Oral sex is 56 points. Taking and publishing a video of the abuse is 20 points. Over the clothes or under the clothes?
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/08/sy...-most.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
