Abuse Plaintiffs Probe the Deep Pockets of the Church

Abuse Plaintiffs Probe the Deep Pockets of the Church

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax
Thursday, Apr. 25, 2002

With the price tag to compensate the legions of alleged victims of sexual abuse by priests during the decade of the 90’s estimated at one billion dollars, the question of where the money will come from has become acute.

Regular donations from the collection plates are off limits and insurance companies are balking, causing plaintiffs’ lawyers to probe the deep pockets of the Vatican.

Prime example: the Boston archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged last month that its insurance policies would not cover an estimated $100 million in settlements of lawsuits against priests accused of sexually abusing children.

A scrambling Cardinal Bernard Law has initiated a special campaign to raise dollars specifically to cover the settlements, receiving to date about $2.5 million in pledges.

Other dioceses around the nation face the same dilemma.

Dioceses on Their Own

The issue: in the Catholic Church, each diocese is a separate entity, responsible for its own budget and certainly not authorized to write checks on the Bank of the Vatican. In an emergency, however, one diocese may borrow from another.

Recognizing the limited resources of the various dioceses, plaintiff attorneys have started to name the Vatican as a codefendant. The bad news for the church is that the question of whether such suits are proper remains unsettled.

Case in point: In 1999, a group of Ukrainian Holocaust survivors levied a class action lawsuit against the Vatican Bank, alleging Holy See complicity in the laundering of Nazi World War II loot, including the proceeds of genocide from some concentration camps.

The Vatican Bank claimed sovereign immunity to the lawsuit, declaring that it is an arm of the Holy See. However, the lawsuit remains viable, leaving open the question of whether a US Court can hear a lawsuit against a Vatican entity.

Church Vulnerability Seen

Some plaintiffs’ attorneys see even more vulnerability and chinks in the ecclesiastic armor.

Recognized as a sovereign entity by the U.S. since 1983, the Vatican "nation” became a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which expressly prohibits the exploitation of children.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Jonathan Levy, who represents some of those reporting abuse, said, "Many of the Vatican’s activities fall outside the traditional actions of a state, particularly when it comes to financing the Church. In the case of the pedophilia cover up, a Vatican policy of protecting guilty priests violates customary international law as well as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

Levy’s theory is that the cover-ups reach all the way to the Vatican and represent the "actions of a rogue state,” thus subjecting Vatican entities to legal process in U.S. courts.

More Bad News

Attorneys such as Levy have garnered a very important witness to aid the cases against the Vatican -- the Reverend Thomas Doyle, a canon law expert who has a lot to say about what the Holy See knew -- and when.

Doyle stands poised to testify under oath that while working in the Vatican embassy in Washington, D.C., he routinely passed to the Vatican details about U.S. priests abusing minors.

A key feature of his testimony is that he was sending such reports as early as 1985.

Additionally, Doyle filed a comprehensive report to Rome beseeching his superiors to face up to "extremely serious financial consequences” and "significant injury” to its image, because of the "sexual molestation of children by clerics, priests, permanent deacons and transient deacons, non-ordained religious, lay employees and seminarians.”

The scathing report, once confidential, is now available on the Internet.

Damage Control

The best buffer the Church may have against the onslaught of bankrupting litigation is the law itself. Many of the plaintiffs have waited years to report the abuse, triggering significant problems with the Statute of Limitations and the standing to sue.

After initially dealing settlements with numbers of "nuisance” claims, the church will have to draw a line in the sand and look to the protections of the law to minimize exposure.

In the meantime, the cash registers are ringing lustily. Besides the shell-shocked Boston diocese, examples of other venues taking a beating:

The diocese of Santa Fe, N.M. ponyed-up $50 million to victims after 20 priests were relieved from duties.

The diocese of Dallas, Tex. paid out $31 million to 11 plaintiffs after the Reverend Rudolph Kos was convicted on seven counts of child abuse. (The original court order threatened to bankrupt the Dallas Archdiocese until the settlement was reduced. Finally, the diocese was forced to sell off property, including an abandoned school.)

The diocese of Bridgeport, Conn. settled a civil case against six priests for undisclosed millions.

The diocese of Santa Rosa, Ca. paid four plaintiffs $1.6 million after minister Donald Kimball was convicted of abuse.

In Louisiana, an undisclosed settlement was reached in a case involving the complaints of 37 boys against Gilbert Gauthe, a parish priest.

And the beat goes on.

As Doyle wrote with such foresight in his 1985 report, "In general, the adage that ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’ is almost always true…. In general, the tip of the iceberg is exposed with a single accusation.”

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Catholic Scandal

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