The Catholic clergy sex-abuse crisis originated in secrecy, nationally and in Spokane. In places far from the light, priests abused young people and told them to keep the actions a secret. And most did, because in the old days Catholics considered priests the human beings closest to God. Few would believe such a horrible truth about these esteemed men.

The young people kept the secrets for decades, and then some brave victims began telling the truth about what happened. They told the secrets to the media. Stories were printed and broadcast, and in the past five or so years, thousands of victims have come forward throughout the country. In the Spokane Diocese alone, there were more than 150 victims.

Though money alone cannot heal damage from abuse, we live in a culture where money is often the only metric used to measure justice. Sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests has cost the U.S. church at least $2.3 billion since 1950, according to the Associated Press. The Spokane Diocese declared bankruptcy because of the crisis, and victims will be paid from a $48 million settlement.

When victims started to tell their stories, some Catholics shunned them or hushed them. Don’t air this dirty laundry in public. Keep the secret or it might destroy the church. Many victims told their stories anyway. And the exposed secrets from the past didn’t destroy the church. In many ways it made it healthier. Groups of parishioners, disgusted and disillusioned, joined together to examine pray-obey-pay attitudes that kept them childlike and disempowered. And strict guidelines now exist to protect the church’s children from predatory adults.

It will be much harder for all institutions, not just the Catholic church, to keep sex-abuse secrets anymore. The media certainly won’t collude in hiding these dark truths, as the media sometimes did in the past for authority figures, and not just clergymen.

The Spokane Diocese bankruptcy was wrenching for the region’s 90,000 Catholics. Parishioners are raising their $10 million contribution toward the settlement. One of the final items in the bankruptcy proceeding is the paying of the lawyers. Their fees – which total more than $10 million – are part of the public record.

But the attorneys involved in the bankruptcy wish to hash out the distribution of the fees behind closed doors. They wish to argue the finer points of their bills in private mediation.

The attorneys are worried that arguing over fees in a public courtroom would expose the baser side of legal work, and air some more dirty laundry in a bankruptcy case filled with it. Doing this in secret, however, is the wrong way to end a bankruptcy case that never would have happened if the church hadn’t kept so many secrets in the first place. Open it up. The victims, and the public, deserve no less.