Edmonton Journal
August 10 2010
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Vatican+child+abuse+cases+falling+apart+Lawyers/3382308/story.html
| Pope Benedict XVI wears a "Saturno" hat as he arrives to lead the weekly general audience in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican, August 4, 2010. |
A U.S. lawyer who has successfully sued the U.S. Catholic church over the long-running child sex abuse scandal on Tuesday said cases against the Vatican are crumbling and he was throwing in the towel.
"You have to have an impossible alignment of planets and moons to win any case against the Vatican," attorney Bill McMurry told AFP a day after he asked a Kentucky court to dismiss a case he brought six years ago to hold the Vatican accountable for all child sex abuse by Catholic clergy in the United States.
"It's out of my hands now. It's impossible to meet the burdens that the courts have placed on plaintiffs" who take on the Vatican, said McMurry.
On Monday, McMurry filed a motion with Louisville district court in Kentucky to dismiss a case against the Vatican filed by three men who claim they were sexually abused when they were boys by members of the Catholic clergy.
The suit, which was originally filed in 2004, sought to hold the Holy See accountable for the acts of pedophile clergy and alleged that the Vatican had a policy of keeping secret any cases of pedophile clergy members.
In March, McMurry filed a motion in a Kentucky court to take sworn testimony from Pope Benedict XVI on what the Vatican knew about the long-running scandal of predator priests.
The three plaintiffs in Kentucky asked to drop their case after earlier rulings in U.S. courts recognized the Vatican as a sovereign state with broad immunity from prosecution, and efforts to find other complainants to add to their lawsuit failed, the dismissal motion said.
Other child sex abuse cases against the Vatican were also fraying at the edges, according to Jeffrey Lena, the lawyer who has represented the Holy See in a number of cases that have come before U.S. courts.
The cases of an alleged serial pedophile priest in Wisconsin and another in California "made a big splash in the newspapers but they've never filed anything," Lena said.
And a high-profile case involving a man in Oregon who alleges that he was abused by a priest as a child will file for dismissal at the end of the month, said Lena.
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