A young man who was abused as a boy by a Catholic priest has won a record three million dollars in compensation from a Pennsylvania diocese, church officials said Friday."Today's settlement represents the diocese's efforts to assist the victim to heal and to move on to achieve a productive and fulfilling life," the diocese of Scranton, in northeastern Pennsylvania, said in a statement.
The deal, which was reached Wednesday, is the highest-ever single amount to be paid out to a victim of a pedophile priest in the United States.
"The diocese fully accepts its responsibility toward this victim and our hope is that true healing can commence now that a settlement has been reached," the statement added.
The deal ends all the lawsuits against the diocese, which covers some 200 parishes.
The Catholic Church counts some 69 million followers across the United States, but has been rocked by the pedophile scandal which surfaced in 2002 and badly hit both its reputation and its finances.
The Scranton victim, who is now 22, has not been identified. But his abuser, former priest Albert Liberatore, was defrocked in 2006 after pleading guilty and being sentenced to 10 years in prison.
"The diocese wishes to express its deep regret and its sincerest apology to the victim and his family members who were so grievously harmed by the former priest Albert Liberatore," the statement added.
The abuse against the victim began a decade ago when he was just 12 years old, and continued until 2002. The victim finally broke his silence in 2004 and the priest was immediately suspended.
The Vatican was then asked to begin procedures to remove the priest from his ecclesiastical duties.
For decades the scale of the abuse by priests in many areas in the United States, mostly from the 1960s until the mid-1980s, remained hidden, and the victims voices went unheard.
The scandal finally broke when the Archbishop of Boston, Cardindal Bernard Law, confessed in early 2002 that he had protected a priest whom he knew had sexually abused young members of his church.
According to the group "Bishop Accountability" some 3,000 priests out of the 42,000 across the country have since been denounced. Some were legally investigated and sentenced, but no action was taken in other cases which dated back to the 1940s.
Since the beginning of the scandal, Catholic authorities in the United States have paid out close to 2.8 billion dollars in damages to victims.
Although the insurance companies have paid out part of the compensation, many dioceses have been forced sell off vast properties to cover their costs, while five have declared bankruptcy.
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