PORTLAND (OR)
Vatican Insider
The U.S. District Court in Portland clears the Vatican of any responsibility for a priest who was pronounced guilty of acts of paedophilia during the 1960s
ANDREA TORNIELLI
Vatican City
On Monday, 20 August in Portland (Oregon), U.S. District Court judge, Michael Mosman, ruled that the Holy See “cannot be considered an employer” of members of the clergy and consequently cannot be held responsible in civil proceedings for sexual abuse committed by priests. Therefore each case should be judged individually and being a priest does not automatically mean the person in question should be treated in the same way as a company employee. In this specific case, the judge ruled that there was a total absence of any “employment relationship” between the Holy See and the priest who committed the abuse.
Legal proceedings ended with a “no jurisdiction” ruling. Attorney Jeff Anderson, who represents a number of sexual abuse victims in the United States, has nevertheless announced that there will be an appeal which the Holy See’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, described as “very hard to win”.
The case reached court ten years ago, in 2002, when the Holy See was charged with responsibility for the acts of Fr. Andrew Ronan, a priest belonging to the Servite Order (OSM), who in 1965 abused a 17-year-old boy. Archive documents revealed that Fr. Ronan abused other children in Chicago and Benburg, Ireland over a period of 15 years but that these episodes were kept secret by the Order and that the Holy See had been informed of all this only when Ronan asked to be defrocked. Ronan’s superiors had decided to transfer him – first from Benburg to Chicago and then from there to Portland – without notifying either the Order’s local representative or the Bishop of Portland of what had happened previously.
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