CHICAGO (IL)
TheMediaReport
JANUARY 29, 2014 BY THEMEDIAREPORT.COM
If there were still any doubt that the Church-suing sex abuse industry is on a steep decline, one need look no further than the latest tactic of contingency lawyers.
Contingency lawyers have recently been demanding as a condition to settle claims that dioceses first empty out their file cabinets of every unrelated accusation of abuse by any priest stretching back 50 or 60 years. The lawyers then hold a dramatic press conference in front of blow-up photos of the accused priests to announce the document release in front of a compliant media.
No other organization other than the Catholic Church has ever, of course, agreed to release decades of unrelated and embarrassing internal documents in order to encourage more people to file lawsuits against it. But for all the trouble, the Church naturally gets no credit. The media narrative is invariably that the heroic contingency lawyers had to bravely fight the documents out of the secretive Catholic Church for years – never mentioning that the delay is caused by the protracted legal proceedings necessary before releasing thousands of pages of legally protected personnel files into the public domain.
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