In one of the first legal attacks on the nation's Roman Catholic leadership, an alleged molestation victim has filed suit contending that bishops conspired over the past 30 years to protect priests who sexually abused children to "avoid detection, public disclosure and scandal."
The lawsuit filed Monday in Orange County Superior Court alleges that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops even conducted seminars to show bishops and dioceses how to discourage and discredit claims of child sexual molestation, how to conceal or "sanitize" damaging records of accused molesters, and how to quietly transfer the suspected molesters without raising suspicion among congregants.
Some experts say the suit is an innovative legal strategy to hold U.S. bishops accountable for a national wave of molestation cases involving priests that has tarnished the reputation of the church over the past year. Others call it a legal grandstanding ploy with no credibility.
"This is an inevitable and logical conclusion to all that has been revealed in the past year," said Richard Sipe, a former priest and national authority on sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church who has testified for the plaintiffs in many molestation cases. "There is good evidence that the bishops conference has been aware of and consulted on sexual abuse issues."
An attorney for the bishops conference called the suit "frivolous," saying that the national association of bishops never engaged in the kind of tactics alleged.
And, as a point of law, the conference, which functions roughly like a professional association for bishops, has no authority to enforce its policies and guidelines in the nation's 165 autonomous dioceses, said Mark E. Chopko, general counsel for the conference. He said the conference has been named only once before in a sexual abuse suit, and eventually was dropped as a defendant.
"The premise that we're somehow involved is completely wrong as a matter of law, a matter of fact, and a matter of equity," Chopko said Monday.
Also named in the suit filed by David Price are the Los Angeles and Orange dioceses and a Maryland treatment center for clerics.
Price, 37, alleges that he was molested as a teenager by Msgr. Michael Harris, his principal at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, over a five-year period ending in 1983. The dioceses of Los Angeles and Orange paid $5.2 million last year to settle molestation allegations by another plaintiff against Harris. The former priest has denied all allegations.
