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	Justices to Hear Catholic School Abuse Case The Capital Times October 26, 2007 http://www.madison.com/tct/news/253380 The state Supreme Court will hear a case charging that the Madison Diocese and Milwaukee Archdiocese covered up sexual abuse of students by lay teacher Gary Kazmarek in the 1960s, allowing him to continue teaching and molest children in a Catholic school in Louisville, Ky. The suit was brought by five Kentucky men, who have already won a settlement from the Louisville Archdiocese and a criminal conviction against Kazmarek. After leaving Louisville, Kazmarek returned to Wisconsin to teach in the Madison Metropolitan School District and was convicted in 1983 of molesting a boy at Cherokee Middle School. Advocates for victims of sex abuse by priests say that the court's taking the case may signal a willingness to further chip away at a wall of case law, erected in the 1990s, that insulates the Catholic Church from civil liability for the sexual misconduct of its employees in Wisconsin. "There's two important areas of the law that are not clear — the corporate status of the church as a religious organization and the statute of limitations on child sex abuse," Peter Isely, Midwest coordinator for SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Thursday. A state appellate court last year ruled that the Kentucky victims of Kazmarek could not sue the Madison Diocese and Milwaukee Archdiocese because the statute of limitations had expired on incidents that took place 30 or more years ago. But in July, the court in another case ruled that adults who say that fraudulent representations by the church put them in the hands of molesters can sue, even if the sex abuse occurred decades ago, because the clock on the statute of limitations starts only when the cover-up by the church was revealed. Officials of the Madison Diocese already have denied that they had any knowledge of abuse by Kazmarek. However, in the Kentucky lawsuit, Kazmarek testified that he abused seven to 10 boys at St. Bernard's School in Middleton, and that the late Monsignor Ferdinand Mack, then pastor, knew about it by the time Kazmarek left Madison in 1967, according to a sworn deposition. The complaint in that lawsuit quotes Kazmarek as saying he came to Madison after being told only to "leave Milwaukee quietly" when it was discovered he had abused a child there, despite the archdiocese's promises to parents that he receive treatment and would have no more contact with children. In 2005, SNAP staged a rally in front of St. Bernard's, presenting the Rev. Douglass Dushack with a letter asking that he and Bishop Robert Morlino help Kazmarek's victims get information about him. Dushack said then that the only records he could find on Kazmarek were a few Internal Revenue Service W-2 forms. Donald Heaney, the Madison Diocese's attorney since 1959, said in 2005 regarding abuse by Kazmarek: "I never heard about such a thing at the time." No hearing date has yet been set for the case, which the court announced this week it would accept.
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