A federal judge is ordering the Archdiocese of New Orleans back into court to prove why the archdiocese’s five-year-old bankruptcy case shouldn’t be dismissed.
According to our partners at WWL-TV, Judge Maredith Grabill ordered church officials to return to her courtroom in June to makes their case. In her order, Grabill suggested that the archdiocese has failed to make progress on settling claims filed by more than 500 clergy sex abuse victims.
The lack of progress stems from a disagreement within the church on how to settle the claims. The archdiocese issued a plan to pay surviving claimants an average of $125,000 apiece.
Meanwhile, a different plan created by a committee representing the victims called for payouts of around $2 million per victim.