BishopAccountability.org
	Vatican Publishes Interal Documents about Pedophile Priest By Bridgette P. LaVictoire Lez Get Real August 17, 2011 http://lezgetreal.com/2011/08/vatican-publishes-interal-documents-about-pedophile-priest/ The Vatican has appeared more than a little tone deaf when it has come to the child molestation charges against a variety of priests over the years. They have tried to blame others for the scandal and not realized that the problem is not that there are child molesting priests, but rather that there has always been this cover up. The Vatican has now taken the step of publishing some internal files about a priest who was accused of molesting children in Ireland and the United States. The small number of files that were published on the website of Vatican Radio are a small and select part of the documentation that the Vatican must turn over to US lawyers in a case involving the late Reverend Andrew Ronan. The plaintiff in that case is known only as John V. Doe, and he is seeking to have the Vatican held liable for the abuse that he endured. According to the Huffington Post: A federal judge in Portland, Oregon, ordered the Vatican to respond to certain requests for information from Doe’s lawyers by Friday, the first time the Holy See has been forced to turn over documentation in a sex abuse case. The partial documentation released Wednesday includes the 1966 case file with Ronan’s request to be laicized, or removed from the clerical state, after his superiors learned of accusations that he had molested minors in Ireland. The Vatican has stated that the files, which are a few dozen pages, were culled from its internal personnel books and are said to represent the full and known documentation that the Vatican held about Ronan. The sparse amount of documentation would appear to bolster the Vatican’s contentions that they knew nothing about Ronan’s crimes until 1966. Ronan’s crimes against Doe took place before 1966. While the files may, at first blush, appear to be an attempt at greater transparency, the fact that the Vatican has released such a small amount of documentation and done so in public ahead of a trial appears less like altruism and more like an attempt to taint potential jurors in the future. According to the Huffington Post: The file contains a letter written by the Chicago-based provincial of the Order of Servants of Mary detailing accusations that Ronan had abused students while he was a teacher at the Servites’ Our Lady of Benburb Priory in Ireland. The provincial wrote that he had “removed” Ronan immediately from Ireland after discovering the abuse accusations in 1959. Ronan began working in Chicago and was later transferred to Portland. He died in 1992. The Vatican maintains that it is releasing all of the known documents relating to Ronan in order to help determine the question of jurisdiction in this case. Simply put, was Ronan an employee of the Vatican and would this mean that they are liable for his actions. None of the documents released related to these core questions.
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