According to the Los Angeles Times, the latest settlement was for US$13million for 17 victims of alleged abuse by Fr Nicholas Aguilar-Riviera in the 1980s.

Attorneys for the victims allege Cardinal Roger Mahoney and an aide "actively thwarted" and "misled" police.

Officials say this is the last of the archdiocese's pending molestation lawsuits.

The payouts to more than 500 victims have financially devastated the archdiocese.

It has sold off real estate, taken out a US$175 million loan and used some of its US$115 million set aside for cemetery maintenance to pay settlements.

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The Archbishop of Wellington, John Dew, is the nominal owner of more than 170 parish buildings and more than 220 school buildings with an insured value of $350 million.

Up to 50 church buildings have been labelled earthquake risks. Further detailed assessment is now being carried out on each of these buildings, with all results published online.

Each parish will then decide whether they continue using buildings, with some preferring to make alternative arrangements until strengthening work was done, Mullin said.

The assessment of the earthquake risk for school buildings is assessed through a separate programme run by the Catholic Schools Board.

Catholic Schools Board executive chairman Gary Quirk said five schools in the Wellington archdiocese and the Palmerston North diocese require some work. The cost will be about $10m.

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• Image Sumner Red stickered group

The changes aim to save money in the parishes, which are "in a spiral of financial distress," church officials say in confidential minutes of meetings where the plan was discussed, AP reports.

Under the plan, more church closings would be possible, but they would be initiated by the new parish groups, not the archdiocese, as they were during the recent, painful round of closings.

The minutes also reveal Cardinal Sean O'Malley's regret about how the archdiocese handled the closings that started in 2004, reducing the number of parishes from 357 to 291.

At the time, parishioners charged the archdiocese with shutting down healthy parishes without warning or reason. Some have since occupied their parish churches in round-the-clock protests.

Monsignor William Fay, head of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Planning Commission, emphasized the current restructuring plan is a work in progress. He said there's no set timeline to complete it, and changes will come only after extensive consultation with local Catholics.

"We've got to move forward aggressively, but in a very thoughtful way," he said. "We should be able to take the time we need to take to make sure this is done right."

The archdiocese has cited numerous statistics to show it must run differently. Among them: 40 percent of its parishes won't be able to pay their bills this year; the number of available priests will plummet from 316 today to 178 in a decade; only 17 percent of local Catholics now attend Mass.

In theory, the streamlined parish would run cheaper, even as it's being strengthened spiritually and numerically by an ongoing evangelization push, including the "Catholics Come Home" advertising campaign that aimed to draw lapsed Catholics back to church.

American Catholics are traditionally loyal to their congregations and pastor, but not the hierarchy, and that makes it tough when archdioceses try to lead change, said David O'Brien, a church historian at the University of Dayton.

It's also clear, though, that the current structure must be altered, O'Brien said.

Source

• CBS Boston
• Image: Boston Archdiocese