The Great Shakedown Keeps A-Rollin’: Phony Claims Continue at Epic Pace, Here Are The Facts

The legacy media will never admit this, and the professional victims' groups will outright lie. But the facts are the facts.

Bogus abuse accusations against Catholic priests are now off the charts. Fraud being perpetrated against the Church is rampant. But don't take our word for it. Here are the undisputed numbers:

● In 2021, in a church of 70 million people in the United States, 44 current minors came forward alleging that a current priest had recently abused them. However, only four of these 44 were found to be "substantiated" by the very lenient standards of diocesan review boards, while the remaining 40 (or 91% (!)) were found to be completely bogus.

● According to the 2022 independent annual audit report, only 6% of all historical accusations against Catholic priests in 2022 were even deemed "substantiated," with the majority of accusations deemed either "unsubstantiated" (indeed false*), "unable to be proven," or still under review.

● In 2011, a former FBI investigator examining abuse claims against priests in Los Angeles attested in a Los Angeles County Superior Court filing that "ONE-HALF of the claims were either entirely false or so greatly exaggerated that the truth would not have supported a prosecutable claim for childhood sexual abuse." (Emphasis in the original document.)

● The Archdiocese of Boston – arguably the most publicly transparent diocese with regards to accused priests – has published the names of 60 priests who have been determined guilty of abuse by either canonical or civil proceedings. Yet it has also concluded that 38 priests have been falsely accused. In other words, nearly 40 percent (38.8%) of priests in Boston are determined innocent after a complete investigation. Let that sink in.

And then there's the money

In a 2019 article in The New Yorker, the Archdiocese of New York openly admitted that it had "lenient standards of evidence" when it came to doling out some $61+million to accusers and that it paid on many "weak claims." The archdiocese said it paid out on flimsy cases "in order to lead to a collective sense of resolution," according to the article, whatever on earth that means.

That the Church regularly pays out on specious and even goofy claims should not surprise any longtime reader of this site. We reported a while back how the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, a small diocese in Louisiana, openly admitted that even though "there has not been a case that we deemed to be true," it had still paid at least one claim alleging abuse decades earlier.

Simply put: Fraudsters, flimflammers, and mental cases now score big cash settlements by making claims of past abuse. And the more the Church pays out on these bogus claims, the more claims it gets. This is not complicated, but simple human nature and motivation. There is no downside to filing suit, which you get to do anonymously. So why not give it a try?

Indeed, there was once the shocking story of two robbers who walked into a sacristy in Illinois after Mass and demanded money from a priest with the ominous threat, "We'll say you touched us, read the paper, they'll believe us."

And then there was the story of an imprisoned man actually recorded on phone calls scheming to rip off the Church with a bogus abuse claim with a friend who had already done so. (An East-coast attorney once wrote that prisoners falsely accusing priests for money was a "current and popular scam." And he wrote this in 2001, some 23 years ago!)

And not to be forgotten: the horror show in Philadelphia, where multiple priests were falsely accused and a completely innocent priest died in prison. (Note to writers in the Catholic media: If you don't know what transpired in Philly years ago, please take the time to learn about it.)

A time to step up

The persecution of the Church is not always violent, as it has often been in history. Sometimes it is economic, as it is here in the West. Fueled by media hysteria and hatred, plaintiffs are still continuing to come out of the woodwork to file phony claims to cash in on the big dollars being offered to them.

It is high time for defenders of truth and justice to call out this ongoing extortion racket for what it is and finally push back. Or even more fraud will simply follow.

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* Important note: Some readers are unclear on what is meant by "unsubstantiated" allegations in the annual audit reports of Church abuse. Well, straight from the reports themselves (emphasis added): "'Unsubstantiated' describes an allegation for which an investigation is complete and the allegation has been deemed not credible/false based upon the evidence gathered through the investigation."

In other words, "unsubstantiated" claims are indeed bogus claims.

[See also: "Five Fast Facts About the Media's Catholic Church Sex Abuse Story"]

[See also: The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church (Amazon.com)]