in out-of-court settlements obscured the full scope of clergy sexual abuse in the United States. In exchange, church officials kept a lid on damaging information, victims preserved their privacy, and plaintiffs' attorneys took their cut, usually between 30 percent and 40 percent of the settlement amount.

As part of reforms adopted in 2002 at the scandal's height, U.S. Catholic bishops forbade the use of confidential settlements except for "grave and substantial reasons brought forward by the victim/survivor."

Fran Maier, chancellor of the Denver archdiocese, declined to answer questions about how prevalent confidentiality deals were in the 24-county archdiocese, but he said there have been none since 2002.

In 2004, the archdiocese disclosed that its insurers had paid $997,730 for counseling and settlements to victims since 1950, a pittance compared with dioceses that have endured greater scandal.

"The archdiocese honors its agreements with others," Maier said. "We expect the same fidelity from anyone or any entity that enters into an agreement with the archdiocese. To behave or expect any differently would violate our obligations to the people of the archdiocese. The resources we steward belong to them."

McGee said the abuse continued twice a week for three years, including on a road trip in the priest's 1953 Chevy to Canada and the Grand Canyon.

McGee kept his silence until 1992, when news reports of a Massachusetts priest accused of child sex abuse prompted him to contact church officials.

McGee provided The Denver Post copies of his correspondence with the archdiocese. In a May 1992 response to McGee, R. Walker Nickless, secretary for priests and seminarians, wrote that the Vatican had laicized Stein, or removed him from the priesthood. He did not say why. By that time, Stein was living in the Mullen Home for the Aged, a Catholic facility in Denver.

In 1992, Nickless apologized to McGee and offered to meet with him and provide counseling from a psychotherapist priest. In a follow-up letter in 1993, Nickless wrote, "I want you to know that we do believe you."

"We are very concerned and care deeply for you," wrote Nickless, who was recently appointed bishop of Sioux City, Iowa. "I want to assure you again that none of us feel what happened to you was appropriate."

After McGee met in 1996 with the archdiocese's conduct response team, which fields clergy sexual-abuse allegations, the archdiocese agreed to consider McGee's request for money to cover medical expenses. The settlement proposal arrived in the mail shortly thereafter.

Other men who have accused Denver priests in recent months say that when confronted with a claim, the archdiocese consistently offers to pay for counseling but resists cash settlements.

"They just told me they didn't have the money - that they'd pay for therapy but not a cash amount for damages," said Roy Starks, who approached the archdiocese in 2002 with decades-old allegations against the Rev. Leonard Abercrombie.

Since 2002, several victims nationwide have broken confidentiality agreements to speak out. One of the first was Mark Serrano, a former altar boy from New Jersey. Serrano's agreement, unlike McGee's, did not expose him to repaying the church his settlement, for $350,000.

"I was a good Catholic kid, and I stuck to my word for 17 years," said Serrano, who is active in the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. "All it did was put other kids at risk because I lived up to my end of the bargain at a great personal sacrifice. As victims, we need a voice. In order to heal, we need to be able to talk to other people."

Serrano and others are calling for all U.S. bishops to release victims from confidentiality agreements, so far to little effect. The Archdiocese of New York, for one, declared all secrecy deals null and void three years ago.

"If a person truly wants the matter kept quiet or confidential, it benefits that person," said Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston lawyer who refused confidentiality agreements in representing victims of defrocked priest John Geoghan. "But for decades these things were kept quiet. Now we all know why."

Jeff Anderson of St. Paul, Minn., who represents plaintiffs accusing former Colorado priest Harold Robert White, said he has never signed a confidentiality agreement, which he called "morally reprehensible" vehicles for protecting the church.

Some plaintiffs' attorneys, he said, are taking advantage of the bishops' new policy on confidentiality agreements by telling the church they'll ask for a secrecy pact in return for more money.

Lawyers with sympathies to the church, such as Patrick J. Schiltz, say hardball legal tactics are more often than not the work of plaintiffs' attorneys or attorneys representing the church's insurance carriers.

Schiltz, a professor at the St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, who represented Catholic churches in sexual-misconduct cases between 1987 and 1995, wrote in the Catholic magazine Commonweal that victims often ask for confidentiality for privacy's sake. He noted that secrecy usually extended only to the settlement amount, not to victims' ability to speak out.

There also may be legitimate reasons for reducing publicity, said Douglas Laycock, a University of Texas law professor and former counsel for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"What the one side looks at like a shameful coverup, to the other side looks like a response to a problem that has affected 2 or 3 percent of priests and an infinitesimal percent of the faithful getting attention to the exclusion of everything else the church does," Laycock said.

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