Sexual-Abuse Case Goes to Trial While Los Angeles Archdiocese, Salesians Quibble over Money
California Catholic Daily
May 13, 2008
http://www.calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=e5494987-c5c1-40f2-a082-32f29671eed1
Opening arguments were scheduled to begin today in Los Angeles Superior Court in the trial of a lawsuit alleging that the Salesian religious order knowingly transferred one of its members who had been accused of sexual abuse to St. John Bosco High School in Bellflower, where he allegedly molested other children.
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After the case was filed on Jan. 22, lawyers for the Salesian Society appeared before the state Supreme Court, arguing that the $660 million global settlement the Los Angeles archdiocese had reached with victims of sexual molestation last year allowed the archdiocese the unconstitutional power to scuttle the Society's attempts to resolve the cases against it. Last year, the Salesians refused to join the global settlement.
The archdiocese, insurers, and religious orders were to split the settlement cost payout, with the archdiocese agreeing to make up the difference if the combined payments did not reach $660 million. Salesian Fr. John Itzaina, currently pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Church in San Francisco, testified before the Supreme Court that in a Feb. 14 meeting, Cardinal Roger Mahony told him that the latest court case against the society "can all go away for $50 million and lawyers' fees." Itzaina said he asked Mahony "why he demanded such a high number?" Mahony's reply, said Itzaina, was "that he was still $74 million short."
Archdiocesan attorney J. Michael Hennigan defended the $50 million figure. "The Salesians come last to the table and we are short $74 million," Hennigan told the May 9 Los Angeles Times. "They had a full opportunity to come in proportionately."
Hennigan said that, since it had paid $25 million to 17 Salesian victims in the global settlement, the archdiocese has been dismissed as a defendant in the current lawsuit against the Salesians.
In the lawsuit, three siblings a man and his sisters allege that the Salesian Society failed to protect them and other young people from Fr. Titian Miani, now 81, who, say the plaintiffs, repeatedly molested them in the mid-1960s.
The lawsuit alleges the Salesians routinely transferred members, "often internationally," who abused children.
In 2004, the Dallas Morning News reported that the international Salesian Society has moved over 200 of its members accused of molesting youth from country to country. Of these, as of 2004, 30 members were living free in one country while facing criminal investigations, arrest warrants, or convictions in another country.
In answer to the Morning News' claims, the U.S. Salesian Provincials issued a June 20, 2004 statement saying that, "while one can find a few instances of failure in this regard [moving abusive priests internationally] among a Congregation numbering over 16,000 members, such a general characterization of the Salesians of Don Bosco is patently false and misleading."
The statement explained that "each Salesian province is an autonomous juridical entity, similar to a diocese. Cases of sexual misconduct by individual Salesians are handled by the respective province to which the Salesian belongs."
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