Tiburon’s St. Hilary Catholic Church will help fund abuse settlement

St. Hilary Catholic Church in Tiburon is among the parishes expected to contribute to the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s proposed $395 million abuse settlement. Church and court records also connect a former priest later accused of abuse to the parish in the 1970s. (Ted McDonnell / For The Ark)

The Archdiocese of San Francisco’s proposed $395 million settlement with more than 500 child sexual abuse survivors reaches into Tiburon, where St. Hilary Catholic Church is expected to help pay for the deal and where a priest later accused of molesting children once served.

The archdiocese and lawyers for the survivors announced the proposed settlement June 29. It would resolve about 530 claims brought by people who said they were abused as children by clergy and other church workers, most of them dating back decades. The agreement is not final. Each survivor will vote on it, and U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali must approve it before it takes effect.

For St. Hilary, the settlement carries a direct cost. Although the parish was not part of the archdiocese’s 2023 bankruptcy filing, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone told parishioners in a June 29 letter that parishes “will need to contribute funds and assets not restricted for specific purposes toward this proposed settlement.” Each pastor, he wrote, is being given a specific amount.

The settlement grew out of a wave of lawsuits filed under a 2019 California law, the Child Victims Act, which opened a three-year window, from Jan. 1, 2020, through Dec. 31, 2022, for survivors to sue over abuse no matter how long ago it occurred. The law drew more than 500 suits against the San Francisco archdiocese, which sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2023.

In May 2025, the committee representing survivors released data drawn from those claims. It showed that 71 of the archdiocese’s 88 parishes were tied to abuse allegations. St. Hilary appears once, listed as the location connected to a single claim. The data does not name the accused or give a date.

Church and court records identify at least one accused priest who served at the Tiburon parish. The Rev. Gregory Ingels, ordained in 1974, was assigned to St. Hilary in 1975 and 1976, according to assignment histories compiled by the survivors’ attorneys and by the watchdog group Bishop­Accountability.org. During those same years, he was based at Marin Catholic High School in Kentfield, where multiple people later accused him of abusing children between roughly 1972 and 1977.

Ingels went on to become one of the archdiocese’s most senior canon lawyers, serving as judicial vicar and as a canonical adviser to the archbishop. Bishop­Accountability reported that then-Archbishop William Levada was made aware of an allegation against Ingels in 1996 but allowed him to remain in ministry. Ingels was placed on leave in 2002 and criminally charged in 2003. The charges were dropped months later after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling barred the retroactive extension of the criminal statute of limitations. He was among the priests named in a $21.2 million archdiocese settlement in 2005. He died Nov. 7, 2024, having never been convicted.

The archdiocese would not say whether the single claim tied to St. Hilary involves Ingels.

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