By Bryan Denson
The Oregonian
August 18, 2011
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/08/portland_case_forces_vatican_t.html
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| St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. |
A Portland man's lawsuit has forced the Vatican to turn over records for the first time in a case alleging sex abuse by a priest.
U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman in April ordered the central authority of the Roman Catholic Church, called the Holy See, to release documents sought by a Portland man known as John Doe.
Doe has accused the late Rev. Andrew M. Ronan of sexually abusing him in the 1960s, when Doe was just a teen. Ronan was a priest at St. Albert's Church in Portland. He died in 1992.
The case, which has dragged on for years in Mosman's Portland courtroom, now hinges on whether Ronan was an employee of the Holy See. Lawyers for the Catholic authority say no; Doe's lawyers say yes, and they want the Vatican to pay for the harm done to their client.
A lawyer for the Holy See posted a statement Wednesday chastising Doe's lawyers for repeatedly claiming that officials in Rome transferred Ronan to Portland knowing that he posed a danger to children.
"The Holy See was not involved in Ronan's transfers, including the transfer to Portland, and had no prior knowledge that Ronan posed a danger to minors," wrote Jeffrey S. Lena.
The Vatican took the unusual step of releasing dozens of pages of discovery in the case of John V. Doe vs. Holy See. The papers were posted on the Vatican Radio web site. Most were in Latin or Italian, while some were in English.
Read the documents released by the Vatican.
Lena said the Vatican only learned of the accusations against Ronan in 1966 -- a year after Doe's abuse in Portland -- when he asked to leave the priesthood.
Ronan spelled out why in a letter dated Feb. 14, 1966: "The reasons for my request are based on my repeated, admitted, documented, homosexual tendencies and acts against the vow of chasity (sic) and celebacy (sic) of the priesthood."
Another letter, which reached Rome as part of Ronan's personnel file in 1966, came from the head of a Catholic province in Chicago. The 1963 missive urged an official in Rome not to give Ronan a teaching position there.
The Chicago priest wrote that he had removed Ronan from a teaching position in 1959 in Benburb in Northern Ireland "because of homosexuality with the students, which he freely admitted and confessed when the fact had been brought to the Prior by one of his students."
He transferred Ronan to the United States immediately, he wrote. Ronan worked in Chicago, then Portland.
"We lost vocations as a result of this in Ireland and we are most fortunate that more scandal did not come," the Chicago priest said.
Doe's lawyer, Jeff Anderson, posted a statement on the website of his St. Paul, Minn., firm saying he would reserve comment on the documents until after he gets them. But he pointed out that the discovery -- standard evidence provided by opposing lawyers in court cases -- was only a partial disclosure of what the court ordered.
Anderson and other lawyers involved in the case hope to receive more documents Friday.
"The Vatican release makes no mention of existing documents containing knowledge of abuse in Ireland and the United States that Vatican protocols, issued in 1922 and 1962, require to be forwarded to the Holy See," he said. "Indeed, the absence of these documents in the discovery would clearly raise more questions and concerns."
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