A U.S. Catholic bishop is sharply criticizing a large payout to his accusers even after the Holy See said it had found no evidence to support allegations of abuse against him.
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Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston-based lawyer who has represented numerous Catholic abuse victims, said in a press release this week that two accusers of Brooklyn Bishop Emeritus Nicholas DiMarzio had received separate six-figure payouts to settle their abuse claims.
The two accusers claimed DiMarzio had abused them in the 1970s and early 1980s when the prelate was then a priest in New Jersey. The men went public with the allegations in 2019 and 2020.
Both accusers filed suits against DiMarzio and the Archdiocese of Newark in 2021. Later that year, what was then the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found that the allegations did not have “the semblance of truth.”
DiMarzio himself has repeatedly and strongly denied the allegations. In a statement this week the retired bishop reaffirmed those denials. “As I have said from the very beginning, in my 50+ year priesthood, I never abused anyone,” he said.
The prelate pointed out that an “exhaustive two year canonical investigation” cleared his name, and further that he “took a lie detector test and passed it.”
“I did not authorize these settlements because I did not abuse anyone,” DiMarzio said this week.
The bishop’s lawyer, Joseph Hayden, noted in a statement that the investigation that cleared DiMarzio was led “by independent firms headed by a former federal prosecutor and former FBI director.” They were conducted under the Vos estis lux mundi guidelines promulgated by Pope Francis, he said.
In a statement this week a Newark spokeswoman said the archdiocese "chose to settle the lawsuits to avoid the costs of litigation and help bring resolution to painful matters for everyone involved."
Hayden described the payments as “a business decision.”
“Bishop DiMarzio did not authorize or approve the settlements, nor did he participate in any settlement negotiations,” the lawyer said.
“In fact, he did not sign the settlement agreements, nor did the settlement agreements admit liability on the part of the Archdiocese or Bishop DiMarzio,” he added.
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‘A charade of an investigation’
In a statement to CNA, meanwhile, Garabedian disputed the results of the Vatican’s 2021 conclusions regarding the abuse allegations.
Describing the inquiry as a “charade,” Garabedian claimed that investigators did not directly query one of the accusers about whether he had been abused by the bishop.
The Vatican’s ruling was “not surprising given the cover up the Catholic Church has been practicing when investigating clergy sexual abuse over the decades,” the attorney claimed.
DiMarzio resigned from his post as bishop of Brooklyn in 2021, shortly after the Vatican cleared him of the abuse claims.
The Vos estis lux mundi guidelines under which DiMarzio was investigated were first promulgated by Pope Francis in 2019 before being made permanent in 2023.
The revised norms established obligatory reporting for clerics and religious, required that every diocese had a mechanism for reporting abuse, and put the metropolitan archbishop in charge of investigations of accusations against suffragan bishops.
Francis at the time stressed that sex abuse crimes “offend Our Lord, cause physical, psychological, and spiritual harm to the victims and harm the community of the faithful.”
At the Vatican on Monday, Pope Francis recalled the hospitality and peacemaking of St. Bernard of Aosta, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore, sed quia non numquam eius...
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