ALTOONA (PA)
Altoona Mirror
AUG 16, 2019
By Russ O’Reilly
The Pennsylvania Superior Court has denied the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown’s application for re-argument in the lawsuit of a woman who claims a pedophile priest consistently molested her in the 1970s and ’80s in Blair County.
Wednesday’s ruling reaffirming that Renee A. Rice can pursue her lawsuit against officials in the Altoona-Johnstown Roman Catholic Diocese reflects an evolving legal landscape, according to Rice’s attorney, Richard Serbin of the Janet, Janet & Suggs law firm.
“This decision confirms my position that the lawsuits I have recently filed in Dauphin and Centre counties will be able to go forward with the litigation process, allowing a jury to decide the factual questions raised,” Serbin stated in an email. “This is good news for many child sex abuse survivors.”
A day before the Superior Court’s decision on Rice’s case, Serbin filed two new lawsuits in Centre County against defendants including the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese stemming from the alleged abuse of two boys by a Jesuit seminarian decades ago.
Those lawsuits are filed on behalf of two accusers who attended the Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church, where the seminarian repeatedly sexually assaulted both boys and raped one of them in the early 1970s. One of the two took his own life when he was 32.
In another lawsuit Serbin filed in Dauphin County against the Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg and some of its officials, a man, 67, claims he was raped by two priests from the Diocese of Harrisburg decades ago beginning when he was 9. The statute of limitations has long expired for him.
Those lawsuits, with Rice’s at the forefront, focus not so much on the sexual abuse but rather the failure on the part of the dioceses to fulfill obligations to active members of parish churches.
Rice’s case was previously dismissed by a Blair County judge on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.
But on June 11, a state Superior Court panel reinstated the lawsuit against the diocese.
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