Suing the Church

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has written an important article in the current issue of Father Richard John Neuhaus's First Things magazine relating to sexual abuse lawsuits against the Church and retroactive changes in the statutes of limitations. It will happen here as current cases run out and the lawyers look for more work.

Last summer, attorneys in Colorado filed the first sex-abuse lawsuits against the archdiocese of Denver since the national clergy abuse scandal began four years ago. All of the suits involved two men: one, a laicized former priest who left active ministry more than a decade ago, and the other, a priest dead for more than a decade. Several of the suits have since named individual parishes as targets along with the diocese. Every claimed incident of abuse occurred more than twenty-five years ago. Nearly all occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.
[snip]
Plaintiffs’ attorneys and victims’ groups often work together in this new strategy of amending the statutes of limitations. Victims’ groups may act as stimulants to sympathetic news media and state lawmakers. Plaintiffs’ attorneys may then offer help in drafting new legislation from which they themselves hope to benefit. This happened in California with Senate Bill 1779, which became catastrophic state law. The bill opened a one-year window to revive expired California sex-abuse claims, some from seventy years ago, and more than a thousand plaintiffs then filed previously expired claims. The California bill was developed with the direct assistance of [Minnesota] attorney Jeffrey Anderson, who has very profitably sued Catholic dioceses and institutions across the country for years. A proposed Colorado version of the legislation is modeled directly on California’s.
[snip]
In judging it, however, we need to consider the bill’s basic fairness. Any revision to civil statutes of limitations must be comprehensive, fair, and equally applied. This almost never happens. The data clearly show that the sexual abuse of minors is not a disproportionately Catholic problem. In fact, some of the worst adult sexual misconduct with minors occurs in public institutions, particularly public schools. But in most states, those schools enjoy some form of governmental immunity. In other words, it’s far easier to sue a private institution, such as a Catholic diocese, than it is to sue a public-school district. It’s also a lot more lucrative since, even if governmental immunity were waived, public schools and institutions usually enjoy the added protection of low caps on damages (in Colorado, $150,000). For exactly the same sexual abuse in a public school and a Catholic parish, the difference in financial exposure is millions of dollars.[snip][snip]