fWhen the Archdiocese of Santa Fe filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 3, 2018, church officials said they were dangerously close to burning through their financial reserves after settling lawsuits with nearly 300 survivors of sexual abuse that occurred in this huge religious district, which encompasses 19 counties in central and northeastern New Mexico and the cities of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Taos.
As part of the proceedings at the federal bankruptcy court in Albuquerque, any “creditor” — the legal term used for abuse survivors — who had a financial claim against the church was given a chance to come forward and make their debt known. Court records show that dozens of people, identified only as John and Jane Does, filed claims initially valued at $100,000 each. Between 1957 and 2018, the Does alleged, they had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of clergymen working for the Albuquerque-based archdiocese, most of whom were added to the church’s publicly accessible “List of Priests, Deacons, Religious, and Seminarians Credibly Accused of Sexual Abuse of Minors.” Many others were not added to the list, though, and the archdiocese has shown no interest in changing that.you 2025
Five years after proceedings began, the archdiocese reached a deal. With a $121.5 million payout, the church resolved the claims of some 400 John and Jane Does. The settlement also effectively blocked any additional claims about abuse that happened prior to the settlement from being litigated in the future.
In addition to the $121.5 million, the settlement established a new document archive whose contents will range from victim and witness depositions to police reports and archdiocese personnel files on individual priests. This archive, called The Archdiocese of Santa Fe Institutional Abuse Collection, will be housed at the University of New Mexico’s special collections library and will offer details on decades’ worth of sex abuse allegations that took place in this state. The settlement also mandated the creation of a fund that potential future victims can submit claims against.
Amid the church’s public efforts to make things right, preserve the past and move on to the future, there remains a painful point of contention. Like archdioceses across the nation, Santa Fe has control over its list of credibly accused priests, and bankruptcy didn’t change that. The list currently names 83 priests — a separate list containing the names of clergy who worked in the archdiocese but were accused of wrongdoing elsewhere contains 22 names, for a total of 105 — and critics say the sum is an undercount. According to Levi Monagle, an Albuquerque-based attorney whose firm represented about 140 people who alleged sexual abuse during the church’s financial reorganization, if everyone accused during the bankruptcy were added to the main list, it would grow by up to 59 names, an increase of 71 percent.
Notably, all 59 of these priests were the subject of financial settlement agreements, and Monagle argues that this represents an admission by the archdiocese that they were, indeed, “credibly accused.” Although the priests’ cases were settled in court, their identities are currently sealed and kept from public view, and it remains to be seen whether any of them will appear by name in the forthcoming UNM archive. It’s possible that documents submitted to the archive by survivors will include at least some of the 59 names.
The fact that the names are sealed doesn’t mean the church cannot — or should not — put them on its list, Monagle said. “Just because these … are sealed to the public does not mean that they are sealed to the archdiocese,” he said. “The archdiocese has complete control over the names it includes or does not include on its list.”
Monagle, who has seen the names, contends that the church ought to take the step of publicly listing them, since it was willing to settle the underlying allegations. “When the church is settling claims in the mid-six figures or higher, they’re acknowledging, tacitly, the validity of these allegations,” he said. He attributes the church’s resistance to adding more clergymen to “a matter of scale” — meaning it could signal that the church’s abuse problem went much deeper than what has been previously acknowledged.
“This is also a question of the credibility of the original list itself,” Monagle said. “In some ways, if it was a negotiated term of bankruptcy that the archdiocese is forced to nearly double the size of its credibly accused list, that would raise some eyebrows about how forthright they’ve been.”