GILLIAN FLACCUS
LOS ANGELES

Hundreds of people who claim they were abused by clergy in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles can expect to be paid more than $1m each in a $660m (£324m) settlement of their lawsuits.

The deal is by far the largest settlement in the church's sexual abuse scandal. The archdiocese, America's largest, and the plaintiffs were due to hold a news conference today.

An anonymous source with knowledge of the deal placed its value at $660m, by far the largest payout in the church's sexual abuse scandal.

The amount would average a little more than $1.3m (£650,000) per plaintiff.

The case had been due to go to trial today in Los Angeles Superior Court, focusing on 12 plaintiffs who accused former priest Clinton Hagenbach of molesting them. Hagenbach died two decades ago.

Had the case gone to trial, lawyers had sought to put Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, in the uncomfortable position of testifying about the Church's response to abuses dating from the 1940s to the 1990s.

A judge overseeing the cases recently cleared the way for four people to seek punitive damages - something that could have opened the church to tens of millions of dollars in payouts if the ruling had been expanded to other cases.

The settlement also calls for the release of confidential priest personnel files after review by a judge assigned to oversee the litigation, said Ray Boucher, a lawyer for one of the lead plaintiffs.

The settlements push the total amount paid out by the US church since 1950 to more than $2bn, with about one-quarter of that coming from the Los Angeles archdiocese.

A judge must sign off on the agreement.

The release of the priest documents was important to the agreement, Boucher said, because it could reveal whether archdiocesan leaders had been involved in covering up for abusive priests.

"Transparency is a critical part of this and of all resolutions," he said.

The settlement is the largest by a Roman Catholic diocese since the clergy sexual abuse scandal erupted in Boston in 2002.

Facing a flood of abuse claims, five dioceses - Tucson, Arizona; Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Davenport, Iowa, and San Diego - sought bankruptcy protection.

David Clohessy, national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said the deal was by far the largest group settlement with the Catholic Church, although a handful of plaintiffs have received greater amounts on an individual basis than each is to receive from this settlement.

"It is never about the money," Clohessy said. "Victims want healing, prevention, closing, accountability."

The Los Angeles archdiocese, its insurers and various Roman Catholic orders have paid more than $114m to settle 86 claims so far.

The largest of those came in December, when the archdiocese reached a $60m settlement with 45 people whose claims dated from before the mid-1950s and after 1987 - periods when it had little or no sexual abuse insurance.

Some Roman Catholic orders will be carved out of the agreement because they refused to participate. Several religious orders in California have also reached multi-million-dollar settlements in recent months, including the Carmelites, the Franciscans and the Jesuits.

However, more than 500 other lawsuits against the archdiocese remain unresolved despite years of legal wrangling.-AP/Reuters