BALTIMORE — The Survivors Committee wants some of its more prominent sexual abuse claims against the Archdiocese of Baltimore moved from federal bankruptcy court to Maryland civil court — a move that, if approved, would increase the church’s liability exposure by millions of dollars.

Testimony began Tuesday on the committee’s request to bring seven lawsuits in state civil court, where each plaintiff could seek roughly $1 million more in damages than in the lower courts.

Waves of claims have stalled in recent years as the church worked through its 2023 bankruptcy, which the archdiocese sought once the state allowed people who have reported being sexually abused as children to seek compensation at any point in their lives.

Almost three years after the archdiocese declared bankruptcy and paused the civil process, the plaintiffs and the church are still hundreds of millions of dollars apart on a settlement.

“To facilitate real progress,” attorneys for the Survivors Committee are now asking the bankruptcy court to return seven of their more than 900 claims against Baltimore’s archdiocese and its insurers to a civil judge.

Citing similar bankruptcies involving churches in California and New York, the committee’s lawyers argued such a ruling would “jump-start” discussions and remove “structural barriers” that have so far delayed resolution of the case.

“Modifying the stay to allow the (plaintiffs) to proceed with their cases will force the insurers to take a seat at the table, and to negotiate fairly and in good faith or face the very real possibility of adverse trial verdicts,” committee lawyers wrote in a March 25 memorandum.

Attorneys for the Archdiocese of Baltimore and its insurance companies, meanwhile, said that the costs and time spent on litigating a small number of trials would detract from their efforts to reach a larger settlement.

“By maintaining the automatic stay, the Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) process will proceed as intended,” church spokesperson Christian Kendzierski said Tuesday. “This includes the continued focus on mediation intended to move us closer to an agreed-upon resolution to this process.”

The committee’s strategy could, if successful, bring into play the state law that prompted the bankruptcy case and was written partly in response to the church’s alleged decades of perpetuating and concealing abuse.

The Maryland Child Victims Act was signed during the 2023 legislative session and set to go into effect later that fall. Once enacted, the initial version of the bill removed the statute of limitations and allowed claimants to file suits against public and private institutions. Under the bill, a plaintiff could receive up to $890,000 against a government agency or $1.15 million against a private business or organization, such as the Catholic Church.

Days before the law was scheduled to take effect, however, the Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, effectively preventing any lawsuit from being filed against it.

In 2025, after the legislature considered the state’s “potentially enormous” liability and shrank the damage caps in Child Victims Act cases, a judge allowed a brief, almost one-month window for claimants to file suit against the archdiocese. Otherwise, because of the bankruptcy, lawsuits involving the church would have been stalled or barred.

The seven cases requested for state trials would, in theory, be litigated under the Child Victims Act. Whereas the archdiocese’s proposed reorganization plan last month included a roughly $169 million settlement, which would have made a survivor’s average maximum payout less than $190,000, a state-level civil case could result in the $1.15 million verdict made possible by the first version of Maryland’s landmark bill.

Attorneys for the Century Insurance Group, one of many companies that have provided policies to the archdiocese since the 1960s, criticized the cases as “cherry-picked” and unrepresentative of the larger claims pool.

According to Tancred Schiavoni, a lawyer representing Century, one of the seven cases involved Father Joseph Maskell, a schoolteacher whose alleged abuse is featured in the Netflix series “The Keepers,” and another involved Father Maurice Blackwell, who was shot three times in 2002 by a former altar boy who claimed the pastor had abused him.

Schiavoni and his co-counsel said prominent claims such as these, some of which include convicted clergy members, were deliberately chosen “to give one side a strategic advantage over another.”

Lifting the stay and adjudicating such cases, the insurer’s lawyers said, will deplete the church’s resources, shrink the pool of settlement money and cause “irreparable harm” to the archdiocese’s reorganization effort.

Frank Schindler, an advocate with the newly formed Abuse Survivors Coalition, said Tuesday that his organization supported the committee’s efforts to have the cases decided in state court, and welcomed its attempt to place “some financial pressure on the archdiocese to come up with a more reasonable reorganization plan.”

“It was really an inadequate attempt and, in my mind, an attempt to further delay settlement,” Schindler said of last month’s proposed plan. “The archdiocese would much rather continue debating the color of the walls as opposed to finishing the house.”

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michelle Harner, who has handled the church matter since it was filed, will likely issue a written ruling in the days after the evidentiary hearing ends, as she has done with several orders in the past.

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