Lawyers representing hundreds of people who are suing the Archdiocese of Boston with claims of clergy sexual abuse asked the church on Monday to increase its multimillion-dollar offer to settle the lawsuits.
Plaintiffs' lawyers said they presented a counter-offer to the church during a 2-1/2-hour meeting on Monday, but they revealed few details about the size of their proposal.
The archdiocese offered earlier this month to pay $55 million to settle more than 500 civil lawsuits from people who say they were the victims of pedophile priests over the last half-century.
Attorney Jeffrey Newman declined to comment on the exact dollar amount of the counter-offer, except to say it was higher than the church's initial offer and involved a range of money based on a "reasonable assessment" of each claim.
Newman said lawyers based the ranges in part on amounts paid in the past to settle similar abuse claims in Massachusetts.
Last year, for instance, the church paid $10 million to settle claims by 86 people who said they were abused by defrocked priest John Geoghan, a convicted pedophile. That was after the church backed out of an initial $15 million to $30 million settlement offer.
Newman said he was hoping for a "fairly swift response" to the counter-offer from Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley, the archdiocese's new leader who has voiced strong support for settling the cases and ending a scandal that has tarnished the church's image.
"We see this as a unique window of opportunity for Archbishop O'Malley," Newman told Reuters. "Now is the time for him to complete the process and start a new chapter in the book of the Boston archdiocese."
A spokesman for the archdiocese was not immediately available for comment.
O'Malley, who replaced Cardinal Bernard Law as leader of the Boston archdiocese, said last month that protecting children was his top priority, and he promised to heal the wounds inflicted on the church by the scandal.
Law resigned in December over his handling of the scandal, which made headlines around the world.
Internal church documents revealed that Law and other archdiocese officials reassigned priests to other parishes or let them remain in their jobs despite accusations of sexual abuse against them.