How can any amount of money ever make up for being sexually abused whether by a priest or by anybody?
I actually know someone who got money for this. I'm sure he's an extreme outlier, but he was completely nonchalant about it. This guy did some small painting jobs in my house last year over a period of weeks, as I was getting it ready to sell. He was a friendly, chatty guy, prone to long conversations (luckily I didn't pay him by the hour and I was working from home back then so my time was pretty flexible). He told me within the first five or six times he was here I saw him that he was a plaintiff in this big Catholic church abusive priest payout.
What happened, he said, was that a priest invited him and his brother to stay overnight. At bedtime, the priest asked them to strip down to just underwear, not to wear their pajamas. Then the priest got in bed with them and sort of horsed around -- but, the painter said, didn't do anything to them or touch them in any overtly sexual way. The next day when their mother picked them up, they told her what happened and she screeched the car to a stop, demanded details immediately and told them they couldn't stay overnight there again.
So the explanations include:
1) The painter is lying -- not to me (his photo was in the paper at one of the events) and not telling a fake story just to get money. but possibly downplaying the abuse from something more severe. He was very friendly and frank, but there were one or two other things, unrelated to this, that raised my suspicions about his honesty (not as a painter -- that part was fine). So maybe he was just feigning his happy-go-lucky attitude.
2) The circumstances -- underwear left on, no out-and-out sex stuff, his brother was with him and their mom immediately believed them and took action -- softened the trauma and lasting damage. Though he did say it had bothered his brother throughout life more than it had him.
Anyway, he was now one of a group in a class-action suit splitting millions of dollars. I can't remember the exact numbers, but if they'd just divided the money by individuals he would have received well into the 6 figures.
But the painter said they were planning to divide it according to some sort of ranking system by the survivors' degree of assault or level of trauma. That sounds like it would be really difficult -- as his own story attests, two people can have the same experience and be affected differently by it. But I secretly thought that if they did divide it that way the painter shouldn't get much because he seemed very untraumatized.