It’s been 17 years since The Boston Globe published its groundbreaking series on clergy sex abuse.

Some two decades later, a political shift in state legislative bodies and fallout from the #MeToo movement have all collided to bring what many warn is a financial reckoning that could cripple the Catholic church in America.

It was more than a year ago — on November 28 to be exact — that I warned in a GetReligion post about how the church would be hit with a blizzard of lawsuits in 2019 and what a massive story it would be.

Here’s an excerpt from that post:

As the scandals — that mostly took place in past — continue to trickle out in the form of grand jury reports and other investigations, look for lawmakers to try and remedy the situation for victims through legislation on the state level.

With very blue New York State voting to put Democrats in control of both the state Assembly and Senate (the GOP had maintained a slight majority), look for lawmakers to pass (and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Catholic, to sign) the Child Victims Act. The Empire State isn’t alone. Other legislatures in Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey and New Mexico are considering similar measures.

The New York legislation would allow victims of abuse suffered under the age of 18 to seek justice years later as adults. Removing the statute of limitations on cases involving private institutions, like the Boy Scouts and Jewish yeshivas, is at the heart of the battle.

New York did indeed pass the law — and may other states followed in its footsteps. In all, 15 states and the District of Columbia have changed their statute of limitations over the past two years in order to allow for lawsuits regarding rape and sexual assault allegations dating back many decades to be brought to court. In many cases, the offender is long dead.

A story published by The Associated Press on December 3 focused on the Catholic church and would could happen to it financially. It opens this way:

At the end of another long day trying to sign up new clients accusing the Roman Catholic Church of sexual abuse, lawyer Adam Slater gazes out the window of his high-rise Manhattan office at one of the great symbols of the church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“I wonder how much that’s worth?” he muses.

Across the country, attorneys like Slater are scrambling to file a new wave of lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by clergy, thanks to rules enacted in 15 states that extend or suspend the statute of limitations to allow claims stretching back decades. Associated Press reporting found the deluge of suits could surpass anything the nation’s clergy sexual abuse crisis has seen before, with potentially more than 5,000 new cases and payouts topping $4 billion.

It’s a financial reckoning playing out in such populous Catholic strongholds as New York, California and New Jersey, among the eight states that go the furthest with “lookback windows” that allow sex abuse claims no matter how old. Never before have so many states acted in near-unison to lift the restrictions that once shut people out if they didn’t bring claims of childhood sex abuse by a certain age, often their early 20s. 

Those opening four paragraphs should, and did, bring chills to church leaders and their congregations.

Like vultures picking over a carcass, these lawyers have made it good business to sue the church (see the many newspaper, radio and TV ads of the last year) in 2019. The story even ran on the AP wire complete with a photo of Slater, cell phone in hand, on a building rooftop overlooking New York’s iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

That’s not to say these lawsuits aren’t merited.

There has been no claim that these lawsuits stem from fake allegations. Nonetheless, as the AP story notet, the church should be bracing for the worst. The suspension of the statute of limitations — the so-called “lookback windows” with set expiration dates — seem to have disproportionately hurt the church compared to private institutions or public schools. In some cases, that’s because legislators have not included public schools, sports organizations and secular nonprofits in these laws.

The AP story fails to address that major issue. The AP story also contains this information, in a passage that is long, but essential:

Some lawyers believe payouts could be heavily influenced by the recent reawakening over sexual abuse fueled by the #MeToo movement, the public shaming of accused celebrities and the explosive Pennsylvania grand jury report last year that found 300 priests abused more than 1,000 children in that state over seven decades. Since then, attorneys general in nearly 20 states have launched investigations of their own.

“The general public is more disgusted than ever with the clergy sex abuse and the cover-up, and that will be reflected in jury verdicts,” said Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston attorney who was at the center of numerous lawsuits against the church in that city and was portrayed in the movie “Spotlight.”

Said Los Angeles lawyer Paul Mones, who has won tens of millions in sex abuse cases against the church going back to the 1980s: “The zeitgeist is completely unfavorable to the Catholic Church.”

For Mones, the size of lawsuit payouts under the new laws could hinge on whether most plaintiffs decide to settle their cases with dioceses or take their chances with a trial.

“The X-factor here is whether there will be trials,” he said. “If anyone starts trying these cases, the numbers could become astronomical.”

Since the 15 states enacted their laws at different times over the past two years, the onslaught of lawsuits is coming in waves.

The AP story, which ran in numerous newspapers and online news sites, included “the other side” — although it wasn’t enough.

The reaction from the church, as you can read in the excerpt below, was a roundup of past statements with only one new interview from Catholic League President Bill Donohue. There was no visit to a local church to see how these lawsuits would impact a parish and the services they provide to the community, an argument church officials and supporters have made over the past few months. That, too, is a major story.

This is the day the Catholic Church has long feared.

The church spent millions of dollars lobbying statehouses for decades, arguing it would be swamped with lawsuits if time limits on suing were lifted. That battle now lost, it is girding for Round Two, by turning to compensation funds and bankruptcy.

Compensation funds offer payment to victims if they agree not take their claims to court. They offer a faster, easier way to some justice, and cash, but the settlements are typically a fraction of what victims can get in trials. And critics say the church is just using them to avoid both a bigger financial hit and full transparency.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan set up the first fund in 2016, pitching it as a way to compensate victims without walloping the church and forcing it to cut programs. It has since paid more than $67 million to 338 alleged victims, an average $200,000 each.

The idea has caught on in other states. All five dioceses in New Jersey and three in Colorado opened one, as did seven dioceses in Pennsylvania and six in California, including the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest in the U.S.

Such funds, Dolan said in a newspaper op-ed piece last year, “prevent the real possibility — as has happened elsewhere — of bankrupting both public and private organizations, including churches, that provide essential services in education, charity and health care.”

The Vatican, which oversees Catholic churches in this country and around the world, is immune from lawsuits. As a separate nation, the Holy See could not be forced to pay victims following decisions by U.S. courts. What Pope Francis and the Vatican hierarchy choose to do in response — in the form of legal assistance or more money to bankrupt dioceses — remains to be seen. This major part of the story the AP also fails to address, but always could in a future one.

This prompted the aforementioned Catholic League, a conservative pro-church advocacy group, to send an email to its membership a day after the AP story ran (the message was also posted to its website) detailing why suspending the statute of limitations in old cases could hurt the church and society as a whole.

In the message, Donohue noted the following:

This is a fundamental Fifth Amendment right of due process, one that organizations that are as disparate as the Catholic League and the ACLU can agree on. How can a defendant have his rights protected in cases that extend back decades? Were there any witnesses in the first place? If there were, are they still alive? How accurate is their recall? Moreover, there is a really good chance that the accused priest is dead.

How this stress affects the clergy is something the AP tackled in a long feature earlier this week (see tmatt commentary here). Indeed, the ongoing scandal and these lawsuits are weighing heavily on the Catholic clergy. This is where this goes from being a religion story (with obvious political undertones) to a largely legal one.

How this will play out in the courts going forward is a major story. It’s a topic on which reporters who cover courthouses — from local ones on up — need to be educated if they care to accurately cover what will continue to be a big story in 2020.

With fewer and fewer experienced, professional religion-beat reporters in newsrooms, this could become an increasingly trickier thing to do.