What the clergy were told to say

One · What happened

Eight hundred million dollars, and nothing signed yet

The AP reported on Saturday that the Archdiocese of New York and attorneys for about thirteen hundred people who said clergy sexually abused them had agreed to a settlement of eight hundred million dollars. The sum is the second largest of its kind involving an archdiocese in the United States. Los Angeles is first, with a 2024 settlement of eight hundred and eighty million dollars for about a thousand victims, on top of seven hundred and forty million paid earlier. San Francisco agreed in June to three hundred and ninety-five million dollars over about five hundred lawsuits. In December 2025 a federal judge approved at least two hundred and thirty million dollars for victims in New Orleans. The AP’s report gave no payment schedule and no amount for any one person.

A New York law enacted in 2019, as the AP described it, lets people who were sexually abused as children sue their abusers and the institutions that shielded them until they turn fifty-five. Anyone already fifty-five when the law passed had until August 2021 to file for abuse from any year. The agreement would end more than seven years of lawsuits. The parties settled on a framework in May that required everyone who had filed a claim to sign off on it. The archdiocese runs about three hundred churches and more than a hundred and fifty parochial schools, from Staten Island to the counties north of the city. Whether eight hundred million dollars is enough, and whether the 2019 law treated institutions fairly, are arguments for the courts and the legislature, and plenty of people are ready to carry both.

“We are on the verge of being able to, please God, bring some measure of healing,” Archbishop Ronald Hicks wrote in an email to the clergy on Saturday, after the survivors’ attorneys announced the agreement. The AP also quoted him saying the agreement will let the archdiocese “turn its full attention once again” to its mission. For members who ask the clergy about the agreement, he supplied a sentence to say, “please let them know that much progress has been made.” Jeff Anderson, an attorney for survivors who filed claims, called the agreement “a powerful moment in the pursuit of justice” and described it as the unanimous agreement of the survivors who filed claims. His colleague Trusha Goffe called it “an extraordinary achievement for the survivors.”

Two · What it is doing

The sentence kept for the day a church is in the news

“Please let them know that much progress has been made.” The archbishop gave the clergy that sentence for members who ask, and a member of any church can guess what it is for. A leader who sends one has a congregation to steady. A member who trusts the archbishop hears a shepherd giving the men who will be stopped in the hallway after services something true to say. Another member, who has stopped trusting him, hears the same words as a hurt being handled with a statement. Nothing in the sentence itself decides between the two readings.

A reader whose own church sits across town from that one reads the word archdiocese in the AP’s first line and files the story under somebody else’s church. The filing feels like discernment, and in that same second the settlement sits at a safe distance. A member of the archdiocese’s own churches feels the pull to stand up for a church he has belonged to for years. The archbishop’s sentence hands him words for it. Neither reader has stayed with the thirteen hundred.

Under the law the AP described, a survivor of child sexual abuse can sue until the age of fifty-five. Anyone who files at fifty-five over abuse in childhood has waited at least thirty-seven years, and the AP gives no reason for any one person’s wait. Thirty-seven years is a long time to carry something alone, the kind of wait that can follow when the adults around a child agree to keep a matter quiet for the sake of a name. Nobody else can say. An agreement with a number in it gives the rest of the country a tidy place to set the matter down. The lawyers hold the claims and the clergy hold the email. A reader who sets the matter down there is not asked about his own pews or his own house.

Three · Where the ground is

A house that was told to hold its peace

Tamar put ashes on her head and went away crying aloud (2 Samuel 13:19). Her brother Absalom answered with a question and an instruction, “Has Amnon your brother been with you? Now hold your peace, my sister. He is your brother; do not take this to heart” (2 Samuel 13:20). The verse says that after this she lived as a desolate woman in the house of her brother Absalom, who had told her to be quiet. King David heard of all these things and was very angry. Nothing more is recorded of him. Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad, because he hated him for what he had done to Tamar, and the four verses record no one asking her what she needed.

What Corinth was asked

“And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you” (1 Corinthians 5:2). Paul wrote that to the church in Corinth after hearing that sexual immorality had been reported among its members, “of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans” (1 Corinthians 5:1). The verses speak of one man and one household in Corinth and say nothing about children, so no sum and no settlement can be read into them. Paul expected a congregation that found a wrong inside itself to mourn and to act on the man responsible. He said nothing about how Corinth would look to the churches around it.

The child in the middle of an argument

Jesus answered an argument among the twelve over which of them was greatest by setting a child in the midst of them (Mark 9:34–37). He told them that welcoming a child like that in his name was the same as welcoming him, and through him the Father who sent him. Matthew records his words about anyone who causes one of these little ones who believe in him to sin. Such a man would be better off, he said, “to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). The warning stands over anyone who leads one of Christ’s little ones into sin. A congregation that hears those words has reason to call the police when a child has been hurt, before it calls a meeting.

Who the helpless commits himself to

Psalm 10 is a prayer in which the speaker watches the helpless crushed and hears the wicked say in his heart, “You will not call to account” (Psalm 10:13). The psalm answers him, “But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands; to you the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless” (Psalm 10:14). Neither the psalm nor an agreement signed in November sets a date for any one person’s recovery. The psalm says the helpless have a helper who sees the nights no lawyer and no clergyman ever saw, and the thirteen hundred were never out of his sight.

A high priest who sympathizes

Jesus, crucified under Pontius Pilate and raised on the third day, is the high priest of the fourth chapter of Hebrews. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The next verse invites the weak to “draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). Both the person who was harmed and the member who held his peace may draw near there. Either one can take the weight to a pastor or a biblical counselor in the week after a story like this, and the people in the next pew can sit with him on Sunday.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Each of the five takes a telephone or a sheet of paper, and none waits for the signatures in November.

1. 01

   Get your church’s child-safety policy in writing.

   Phone the office at your church and request its written policy on adults who work with children. Ask who may be alone with a child and whom a teacher calls first if a child says something troubling. The answer should name the police or the state’s child protective line. If no policy exists, offer to sit down with the pastor and draft one. In Mark 9:36 Jesus puts a child in the midst of the disciples, and a written policy is one way a congregation keeps a child there.

2. 02

   Teach each child who to tell.

   Sit down with each child old enough to talk. Say that no adult, at church or anywhere else, may ask the child to keep a secret from you about the child’s own body or about being touched. Name two adults the child can go to at any hour. Ask the child to tell you their names back, and repeat the conversation at the start of each school year. Jesus said, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones” (Matthew 18:10).

3. 03

   Put your own line for the church on paper.

   Write down the sentence you give when someone criticizes your church, the one that is ready before the question ends. Under it, write what you would say to a person who was hurt in a church. Take both to a pastor or a biblical counselor. Paul expected the church in Corinth to mourn (1 Corinthians 5:2), so spend longer on the second sentence than on the first.

4. 04

   Reach out to one person who left a church hurt.

   Think of one person you know who walked out of a church and has not been back. Send a handwritten note of two sentences that says you are sorry for what was done in a church and asks for nothing. Leave any invitation to a service out of it. Paul writes of the “God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). A note is one small way a member can pass some of that comfort along.

5. 05

   Take Psalm 10:14 with you until the signing.

   Write the verse on a card and carry it through the week of November sixth, when the signing is scheduled. Pray it each morning for the thirteen hundred, whom God knows by name. Add one line for the members of the archdiocese’s churches, who will be asked this week what they think.