Catholic Church sex abuse cases in the United States

There have been many lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, and scandals over sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in the United States of America.

The issue of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests was first publicized in 1985 when a Louisiana priest pleaded guilty to 11 counts of molestation of boys.^[1] It was again brought to national attention in 2002 following a series of publications by The Boston Globe.

As it became clear that there was truth to many of the allegations and that there was a pattern of cover-ups in a number of large dioceses across the United States, the issue became a nationwide scandal, creating a crisis for the Catholic Church in the United States. Though the sex abuse cases are not unique in comparison to other countries, the sex abuse crisis in the United States is more conspicuous due to the behavior and reaction (or lack thereof) from the clergy and the Vatican.^[2] Allegations in the United States also encouraged victims in other nations to come forward, rapidly creating a global crisis for the Church. Over many decades, priests and lay members of religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church had sexually abused children, principally boys, on such a large scale, that the accusations reached into the thousands.^[3]

"The majority of accused priests in the United States (55.7%) had one formal allegation of abuse made against them, 26.4% had two or three allegations, 17.8% had four to nine allegations, and 3.5% had ten or more allegations."^[4] A major aggravating factor was the actions of Catholic bishops to keep these crimes secret and to reassign the accused to other parishes in positions where they had continued unsupervised contact with youth.

Many of the accused priests were forced to resign or were laicized. In addition, several bishops who had participated in the cover-up were also forced to resign or retire. The dioceses in which the crimes were committed found it necessary to make financial settlements with the victims estimated to have surpassed $3 billion in total by 2012. The revelations nationwide led to a "zero tolerance" policy by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). In December 2019, however, it was revealed that numerous Bishops across the United States withheld hundreds of names from their accused clergy list.^[5][6][7]