Four men who said they were abused by a church worker as children will receive a total of $27.5 million as part of a settlement with the Diocese of Brooklyn, in what the victims’ lawyers say is among the largest U.S. awards paid to individual victims of Catholic Church-related abuse.
The men each will receive $6.875 million, said lawyers Peter Saghir and Ben Rubinowitz, who represented the unidentified men. The money will be paid by the diocese and an unnamed after-school program, the lawyers said.
“The thing that is atrocious about this is the signs that were missed by his supervisors,” Mr. Saghir said. “There were clear warning signs.”
A spokeswoman for the diocese said it “highly contested its role in the sexual abuse of four preadolescents.” The spokeswoman noted the man implicated in the case was a volunteer, not clergy or an employee of the diocese or parish.
The diocese includes 1.5 million Catholics in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
The settlement is the latest in multimillion-dollar payments Catholic dioceses across the country have made to victims in recent decades. In May, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis announced a $210 million settlement with 450 victims of clergy sexual abuse.
In the months since, the church has been hit by a series of sex-abuse scandals, most notably a grand-jury report last month that detailed the abuse of more than 1,000 children by clergy in Pennsylvania over more than a half-century. A lawsuit seeking class-action status was filed Monday. against all the Catholic dioceses in the state.
In the Brooklyn case, Angelo Serrano, who had been a worker at St. Lucy-St. Patrick parish in Brooklyn, was convicted in 2011 of sex crimes including that he engaged in multiple acts of sexual conduct with a child under 13.
Mr. Serrano, who posts included director of religious education at the St. Lucy-St. Patrick parish, was sentenced to 15 years in prison and is at Fishkill Correctional Facility, in Dutchess County, N.Y.
The lawyers for the four men say church staff, including clergy, knew about Mr. Serrano’s conduct and didn’t take action.
From 2003 through 2009, the victims’ lawyers say, Mr. Serrano abused the four boys, who at the time were between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. The boys attended St. Lucy-St. Patrick, the lawyers said.
They said the abuse, which included being anally and orally sodomized, happened in the church, at Mr. Serrano’s nearby apartment and at an after-school program.
In a ruling in one of the cases that was part of the settlement, Judge Loren Baily-Schiffman, of state Supreme Court in Brooklyn, wrote that church staff were required to have received training about signs of sexual abuse.
“The Church’s attempt to minimize the fact that Serrano was caught in the Church office kissing an eight or nine year old unidentified boy as merely an ‘inappropriate embrace and a peck on the lips’ demonstrates a complete disregard of the training that [the pastor] was required to and did participate in,” the judge said.
At least six states, including New York, are now pursuing investigations similar to the one in Pennsylvania. Earlier this month, the New York state attorney general’s office, which is conducting a civil investigation into whether church officials covered up allegations that clergy sexually abused young people, subpoenaed the eight Catholic dioceses in the state.
The dioceses have said they are cooperating with the attorney general’s investigation.
Write to Corinne Ramey at Corinne.Ramey@wsj.com
