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	Court Orders Church to Turn over Documents The Hartford Courant November 10, 2009 http://www.courant.com/community/waterbury/hc-web-church-1111nov11,0,2031841.story WATERBURY — - A Superior Court judge has ordered the Catholic Church to turn over documents related to sex abuse allegations involving priests by Dec. 1. Judge Barry Stevens of Superior Court in Waterbury ordered the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocese Tuesday to turn over compact discs that contain the information the church had sought to keep secret or have destroyed. Stevens also denied the church's motion to have returned or destroyed documents it has already provided to the court. There is one exception to the release order: The court ordered that all copies of one paragraph in a 1997 affidavit of Monsignor Laurence Bronkiewicz remain sealed. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear the diocese's appeal of a state court decision to make public more than 12,000 pages of sexual abuse files involving clergy. The appeal to the nation's highest court likely was the diocese's last legal effort to keep secret documents from 23 sexual abuse cases involving clergy that were settled in 2001. Four newspapers — The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The Courant —have been fighting for eight years to get the documents unsealed.
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