Child abuse: U.S. court rules priests are not Holy See employees

08/21/2012

The U.S. District Court in Portland clears the Vatican of any responsibility for a priest who was pronounced guilty of acts of paedophilia during the 1960s

ANDREA TORNIELLI
vatican city

On Monday, 20 August in Portland (Oregon), U.S. District Court judge, Michael Mosman, ruled that the Holy See “cannot be considered an employer” of members of the clergy and consequently cannot be held responsible in civil proceedings for sexual abuse committed by priests. Therefore each case should be judged individually and being a priest does not automatically mean the person in question should be treated in the same way as a company employee. In this specific case, the judge ruled that there was a total absence of any “employment relationship” between the Holy See and the priest who committed the abuse.

Legal proceedings ended with a “no jurisdiction” ruling. Attorney Jeff Anderson, who represents a number of sexual abuse victims in the United States, has nevertheless announced that there will be an appeal which the Holy See’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, described as “very hard to win”.

The case reached court ten years ago, in 2002, when the Holy See was charged with responsibility for the acts of Fr. Andrew Ronan, a priest belonging to the Servite Order (OSM), who in 1965 abused a 17-year-old boy. Archive documents revealed that Fr. Ronan abused other children in Chicago and Benburg, Ireland over a period of 15 years but that these episodes were kept secret by the Order and that the Holy See had been informed of all this only when Ronan asked to be defrocked. Ronan’s superiors had decided to transfer him – first from Benburg to Chicago and then from there to Portland – without notifying either the Order’s local representative or the Bishop of Portland of what had happened previously.

The U.S. District Court attempted to establish whether the Holy See had employed Fr. Ronan, whether it had been involved in the decision to transfer him from one place to another and whether it was aware that the priest was sexually abusing children. Last of all, it attempted to establish whether Fr. Ronan was an employee of the Holy See. Had the judge decided that these allegations were well-founded, the case would have gone to court and the trial would have begun. Otherwise the case was to be dismissed and no further action could be taken. The court’s final decision was in fact this.

It established that the Vatican was not involved in the affair until 1966, when the Bishop of Portland asked the Vatican’s Congregation responsible for members of the clergy to laicise Ronan after having established that the allegations against him were well-founded. Ronan was immediately laicised and the process took all of five weeks.

Attorney Jeffrey Lena told Vatican Insider: “This is an important case because it demonstrates, once again, the difference between certain allegations and the actual facts that emerge from the documents. After examining hundreds of pages, the judge found no grounds for the plaintiff’s theory that wished to depict the Holy See as Ronan’s employer, or for the claims that it was involved in what happened. As a result, he established that there was no basis to continue with the trial. The court dismissed the theory that considers priests as employees of the Holy See only because they are members of the clergy subject to the general rules of Canon Law. For the first time, the basis of allegations that would have the Holy See involved in transferring paedophile priests and priests considered as employees of the Holy See were examined in minute detail and the judge has ruled that both these allegations are false.”

A final consideration involves dates: why did the Vatican decide to laicise the priest so quickly, following procedures similar to those set up by John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – and then with even greater vigour by Benedict XVI – after the scandal of paedophile priests exploded in the USA, Ireland and Germany? And why in the years that followed, up to 2001, was action not taken with the same promptness? We should take into account the fact that up until the end of Paul VI’s papacy, dispensations for laicisation were granted much more freely to priests who wished to leave the clergy to marry, as well as to priests involved in abuse cases. It was with the papacy of Karol Wojtyla that these procedures were discouraged due to the crisis in vocations: laicisation became rarer and was granted after a long-drawn-out trial. Less generous rules and procedures granting laicisation ended up causing greater delays in the issue of a decision on the punishment which is considered to be the most serious for priests, including those guilty of child abuse. This trend is something Pope Benedict XVI has personally made efforts to reverse by introducing “emergency legislation” to tackle these terrible cases.

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