Three cheers and blessings for this judge!
US judge says the Vatican is not
the 'employer' of local priests
by NIGEL DUARA
PORTLAND, Oregon, August 20 (AP) —
The Vatican has won a major victory in an Oregon federal courtroom, where a judge ruled the Holy See is not the employer of molester priests.
The ruling Monday by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mosman ends a six-year question in the decade-old case and could shield the Vatican from possible monetary damages.
The original lawsuit was filed in 2002 by a Seattle-area man who claimed the Rev. Andrew Ronan repeatedly molested him in the late 1960s.
Mosman made a previous decision strictly on legal theory and determined that if all the facts in the case were true, the Vatican would indeed be Ronan's employer.
But on Monday, Mosman said he looked at the facts in the case and made his decision.
Plaintiff's attorney Jeff Anderson says he will appeal the decision.
The AP subsequently filed a longer story with the following added:
Vatican attorney Jeff Lena said the case should put to rest the notion that the Holy See is liable for the actions of priests.
"This is a case in which, for the first time, a court in the U.S. has taken a careful, factual look at whether or not a priest in the U.S. can be viewed as an employee of the Holy See and the answer, unequivocally, was no," Lena said.
The case is the last major U.S. sex abuse lawsuit against the Holy See. Cases in Kentucky and Wisconsin have been dropped in recent years.
The plaintiffs argued that what they contend was Ronan's fealty to the Pope, the Vatican's ability to promote priests, the Vatican's laicization — or removal — process, and the ability to change priests' training all pointed to the Vatican employing priests.
"We believe that under further scrutiny," Anderson said in a news release, "the courts will find that Vatican protocols and practice make it clear that obedience to Rome required the secrecy and concealment practiced by priests and bishops as the clergy abuse crisis unfolded in the United States."
Lena said the Vatican had little to do with the laicization process unless a priest appealed, and points out that the appellate court will not further scrutinize the facts, but rather the application of the law in the case.
The impact of Mosman's ruling on other priest sex-abuse cases is not yet clear. The case has gone further than any other in attempting to get at the relationship between priests in the U.S. and the Vatican.
Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia School of Law professor, said lawsuits against the Pope are usually dismissed on sovereign immunity grounds, with a U.S. court ruling that the Vatican can't be sued because there is no jurisdiction in the U.S. to do so.
"This was likely filed more to make a political statement," Laycock said.
Mosman took up several hypothetical analogies while questioning attorneys for both sides. He said that, for instance, the Oregon legal bar has many of the same powers over lawyers as the Vatican has over priests: It can disbar someone and issue sanctions, just as the Vatican can laicize priests, but doing so doesn't constitute a firing.
The plaintiffs were trying to show that, by exerting control, the Vatican was the priests' employer.
Mosman said that if he accepted the plaintiff's argument that the Vatican maintains absolute control over all priests, and is therefore their employer, then all Catholics everywhere could similarly be considered employees of the Holy See.
After the ruling, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, director David Clohessy said in a statement that the Vatican wants "to have their cake and eat it too" by varying their definition of the Church, sometimes calling it a top-down hierarchical institution and other times asserting that only locals have control over their employee — an assertion Lena said flies in the face of an appellate court ruling in 2009 and Monday's decision by Mosman.
"It's a shame that, once again, top Catholic officials successfully exploit legal technicalities to keep clergy sex crimes and cover ups covered up," Clohessy said. "The truth is that the Vatican oversees the church worldwide, insisting on secrecy in child sex cases and stopping or delaying the defrocking of pedophile priests." [Yada, yada, yada - and in the supposed interest of fairness, SNAP is given 14 lines in the AP report compared to 4 lines for the Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena!]
I was going to append the following remarks to my commentary on the statements made by financial analyst cited by John Allen in the article posted earlier on this page, because nothing makes the unique organizational structure of the Church clearer than the administrative and fiscal autonomy of the Church's various ecclesial jurisdictions.
I thought Harris's analysis-disabusal of the notion of 'the Church's supposedly deep pockets' would have been a good occasion to link the administrative and fiscal autonomy of the Church's various ecclesial jurisdictions to the concept of subsidiarity in the Church's social doctrine, which holds that local problems must be solved at the lowest level possible before being subjected to higher arbitration, an organizing principle that "matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority".
If Jeffrey Anderson and his fellow Vatican-baiting lawyers had bothered to take a little crash course on the organization of the Church - how it has always been organized since the first Christian communities - they would have realized that parishes and dioceses are administratively autonomous of the Vatican, and it is this autonomy of the local churches that gave rise to the idea of subsidiarity. "Do what you can at your level first, before resorting to higher authority".
With practical consequences that militate against the shysters' delusions of milking the Vatican dry for what it could pay them in damages if only they could show that 1) parish and diocesan priests are employees of the Vatican and that therefore, 2) the Pope is directly responsible for their misconduct and crimes, and the Vatican ought to pay all damages to the victims.
In the Church, local autonomy is the absolute rule for all practical day-to-day administrative, financial and pastoral responsibilities, but obviously does not extend to doctrine. The doctrine of the Church remains uniform and inalterable as it is expressed principally in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. No individual, not even a bishop, and no association - as for instance, the LCRW - has any business or right to tinker with that doctrine, and preach or teach their own thinking as though they were a parallel Magisterium. The Church cannot have a plural Magisterium, any more than a faithful Catholic can choose and pick which beliefs and practices he wants to follow.
I hope there is a more extended version of the Portland case than the AP's bare-bones account, because one would like to see which 'facts' presented by Anderson the judge examined and promptly threw out in making his ruling.
The continuing but time-delayed reaction in the worldwide Church to the problem of pedophile priests means that from time to time, and for quite some time to come, we will continue to get reports like the ff:
An Australian diocese may have to pay
13.5M euros to sex-abuse victims
The crimes, between 1960 and 1990, involved
10 priests and more than 100 victims
August 17, 2012
A Catholic diocese in Australia is negotiating compensations that add up to 13.5 million euros and are to be paid out to more than 100 victims of acts of paedophilia that took place between 1960 and 1990.
[The very thought of ten priests preying on innocents in their care for a period of three decades is horrifying! The horror and the tragedy are never any less, no matter how often one hears and reads about these crimes.]
The August 17 issue of The Australian reports that the diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, north of Sydney, negotiated out-of-court settlements with at least 78 of the alleged victims. Another 25 cases have been nearly settled. However it seems that the total number of victims might be even higher.
The compensations are linked to acts of sexual abuse at the hands of at least 10 priests and teachers employed by the Church and include the highest compensation ever negotiated in Australia, up to approximately 1.7 million euros to an individual victim.
Under the terms of the settlement negotiated through a law firm, the Church does not admit responsibility for the acts of abuse, even though many of the victims see the compensation as a form of recognition for what they suffered.
“The Church usually requests a waiver form that prevents the victim from making further claims for the same acts of abuse and a clause that forbids arguing over the terms of the agreement”, said one of the negotiating lawyers.
This practice by the Australian Catholic Church, named ‘Towards Healing’, began in 1996 to respond to abuse claims and it has been criticized by the victims’ representatives for the lack of independent evaluation of the claims.
I have tried unsuccessfully to track down the original report in The Australian, but my search is turning up all sorts of odd unrelated stuff from years back.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/08/2012 23:40]