Attorneys for the victim in a Wisconsin sex abuse case voluntarily withdrew a lawsuit
against the Holy See on Friday, in which Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinals Tarcisio
Bertone and Angelo Sodano, the Secretary of State and Secretary of State-emeritus,
respectively, were named as defendants. The case was at the centre of media attention
in 2010, when reporters inquired into the role of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in
the prosecution of a priest accused of abusing as many as 200 boys at Milwaukee-area
school for the deaf between 1950 and 1974.
The following is a statement released
on Saturday by California-based attorney Jeffrey Lena, who represents the Vatican
in US litigation.
Statement of Jeffrey S. Lena Regarding John Doe 16 v.
Holy See, et al.
(Case No. 2:10-cv-00346 RTR, U.S. District Court, Eastern
District of Wisconsin) On February 10, 2012, Jeffrey R. Anderson, Esq. of the law
office of Jeff Anderson and Associates, working together with columnist Marci Hamilton,
Esq., filed a voluntary notice of dismissal in the case of John Doe 16 v. Holy See. The
Notice of Voluntary Dismissal -- which was filed by the Plaintiff’s lawyers to avoid
their duty to submit to the Court a court-ordered response to the Holy See’s Motion
to Dismiss -- requested that the “Court take notice of this dismissal and remove this
matter from its docket.”
With these ignominious words, the John Doe 16 case
died silently on a Friday afternoon in what attorney Jeff Anderson has himself called
“the crucible of the courtroom.”
Things were different at the beginning of
this case. On April 22, 2010, counsel for Plaintiff orchestrated a press event replete
with props and other trappings designed to induce a media feeding frenzy. During the
frenzy, Plaintiff’s counsel dramatically announced that they held information demonstrating
a “world-wide conspiracy” related to sexual abuse that was directed by the Holy See.
That outworn and discredited claim was in fact the centerpiece of a planned sequence
of media events that took a very serious matter -- the sexual abuse of a child – and
turned it into a tool to assert fallacious allegations of Holy See responsibility
and liability for John Doe 16’s abuse.
As a point of illustration, the Plaintiff’s
attorneys used allegations in the John Doe 16 case to foster the myth that Crimen
sollicitationis -- a 1922 document mainly concerning abuses of the confessional --
effected some sort of world-wide cover-up which prohibited the reporting of sexual
abuse to civil authorities. This erroneous idea, promoted for years on the internet
and in innumerable court filings by these lawyers and lawyers of their ilk, was offered
up yet again in John Doe 16 in a bite-sized morsel for ready media consumption.
Perhaps
blinded by attorney razzle-dazzle and the intonations of international conspiracy,
most observers of the case tended to ignore three facts which the Holy See had already
made public through an expert’s detailed and scholarly commentary. This commentary,
which was offered under penalty of perjury in the case of O’Bryan v. Holy See, was
publically available, and remains to this day un-rebutted by plaintiffs in John Doe
16 v Holy See, or in any other case.
The points are as follows:
First,
that Crimen was itself the first “reporting statute.” That is to say, long before
any civil jurisdiction in either Civil Law or Common Law countries had even contemplated
imposing a duty to report such crimes, Crimen articulated specific procedures -- procedures
already reflected in the 1917 Code of Canon Law itself -- that canonical crimes relating
to abuse should be reported for investigation and prosecution by ecclesiastical tribunals.
Second,
Crimen obviously could not have been designed to prevent reporting under civil law
reporting statutes because there were no civil reporting statutes in existence when
Crimen first appeared in 1922. And by 1962, when Crimen was reprinted with minor modifications,
there still were no reporting statutes of any sort that Crimen could have possibly
interfered with.
Finally, Crimen dealt with canonical obligations, not civil
obligations, and did not bar the reporting of incidents of sexual abuse to civil authorities,
whether before or after civil reporting statutes came into force. These three points
-- which required some understanding of the relationship between the canon law and
civil law which plaintiff attorneys appear to refuse to grasp -- were not taken up
in the public discourse. Instead, with certain notable exceptions, most media continued
to faithfully reprint the breathtaking claims byPlaintiff attorneys that Crimen equaled
“cover-up.” As a result, the public was profoundly and unnecessarily misled -- perhaps
with global consequences. No one can, or ever should, doubt that these attorneys
have the right to state their beliefs and zealously assist their clients in pressing
legitimate claims. Filing lawsuits, particularly where there may be gaps in legislation,
remains part of a core tradition in the United States of using courts as a forum to
articulate social wrongs. Indeed, filing legitimate lawsuits relating to claims of
child sexual abuse have made all institutions ask hard questions about what changes
must be made to protect children.
But a case like this one against the Holy
See, which was held together by no more than a mendacious web of allegations of international
conspiracy, amounted to a misuse of judicial process and a waste of judicial resources.
Mythology about the Catholic Church to the contrary, the Holy See is not responsible
for the supervision of the more than 400,000 priests around the world. Attorneys in
this case knew that, and their knowledge of this fact is precisely what made the filing
of this lawsuit so pernicious in the first place -- such misuse of the legal process
leads to disrespect for lawyers and courts, and never helps the pursuit of legitimate
legal claims.
What must not be lost sight of here -- or better, what must be
remembered -- is that many years ago, John Doe 16, a boy alone and burdened by a disability,
was terribly abused. As Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly said, abuse -- whether in
public or private institutions, by whomever, and of whatever creed or religious affiliation
-- is a sin and a crime.
It is sad that in the hands of one attorney with a
penchant for press conferences and another attorney who spends her time writing a
slanted web-based column promoting herself and co-counsel as heroes, John Doe 16’s
true plight and suffering became an instrument of public deception.