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	Saying Late Priest Was Their Father, Two Sue Religious Order By Irene Sege Boston Globe May 29, 2009 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/29/2_who_say_priest_was_their_father_sue_church/ A brother and sister who say they are the offspring of a priest from Foxborough have sued a religious order and the Archdiocese of Baltimore for $10 million in damages for child support. The priest, the Rev. Francis E. Ryan, was a member of the St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart, an order whose headquarters are in Baltimore. The lawsuit - filed by Adrian Senna, 63, and Carla Latty, 56 - is the latest chapter in a dramatic family story that had been cloaked in mystery for decades and that crosses religious and racial fault lines. Growing up in the South, Senna believed he was the second of the three children of Anna Maria "Ria" Franklin Senna, who was black. He had heard rumors of his mother's affair with the white priest, and after his family moved to Roxbury in 1954, Senna said, he observed Ryan coming from his mother's bedroom. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Latty was searching for her birth mother. She had been born in 1952 and put up for adoption while Ria Senna's three older children were living in an orphanage in Alabama. In 2006, Latty learned that Ria Senna was her mother. Adoption records said her father was a white Irish-American man. DNA testing confirmed that she and Adrian Senna are full siblings. After a story appeared in The Boston Globe in 2006 about their quest for answers about their parentage, relatives of Ryan came forward. Latty and Senna soon had DNA evidence that they and Ryan were related. Both Ryan and Ria Senna are deceased. Ryan never acknowledged his paternity, Senna and Latty assert in their suit, which seeks both compensatory and punitive damages. "We're talking about compensation for the things he failed to provide when he was alive and we were young," said Senna, a filmmaker, actor, and musician who was reached by telephone at his home in British Columbia. "He pursued my mother, and the order knew about it." Latty, an attorney, attended yesterday's press conference in Baltimore. There, she recalled later by telephone, her voice had broken as she addressed reporters. "I'm hoping other people don't have to go through what my family went through. I'm thinking of the orphanages and my being put up for adoption," she said. "Maybe the church will rein in their renegade priests." The suit was filed April 1 in Baltimore Circuit Court, according to Carmen Durso, a Boston attorney representing Senna and Latty, and papers were served yesterday on the defendants' attorney. The Rev. Edward Chiffriller, the Josephites' superior general, declined to comment. Sean Caine, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said the archdiocese was asking to be removed from the suit because Ryan was never a diocesan priest.
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