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	Mexican Plaintiff Sues Cardinals By Ashby Jones Wall Street Journal April 21, 2010 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704448304575196600086134806.html?mod=WSJ_World_LEFTSecondNews A Mexican man on Tuesday sued the cardinals of Mexico City and Los Angeles, alleging they failed to take steps to prevent a Mexican priest, an alleged known pedophile, from committing further acts of abuse, in the latest in a string of unwelcome developments for the Catholic Church. The suit, filed in Los Angeles federal court by an unnamed plaintiff, alleges that Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Tehuacán, Mexico, moved the priest back and forth between archdioceses in Mexico and Los Angeles while fully aware that the priest had sexually abused boys while a priest in both locations. The priest, the Rev. Nicolás Aguilar Rivera, allegedly molested the plaintiff, who at the time was 12, in 1997, according to the complaint. Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, emphasized that the claims against the priests were old, and that documents show that "Cardinal Mahony urged Aguilar Rivera's return to the U.S. to face justice." Mr. Tamberg added that the claims were "preposterous and without foundation." A spokesman for Cardinal Norberto Rivera declined to comment. Father Aguilar Rivera couldn't be reached to comment. Judges have thrown out two previous lawsuits involving Father Aguilar Rivera on the grounds that a Mexican citizen can't sue another fellow citizen in U.S. court. Minneapolis attorney Jeff Anderson filed the suit Tuesday under a different legal theory, using a once-obscure law enacted in 1789 called the Alien Tort Statute which he says allows him jurisdiction in Los Angeles federal court. The controversial law has been revived in recent years as a way to sue major companies for alleged complicity in crimes overseas, including torture and murder. Legal scholars seemed skeptical of the theory. Curtis Bradley, a law professor at Duke University and expert on the Alien Tort Statute, said on Tuesday that the law is applicable against individual defendants only in rare instances, such as genocide. "Sexual abuse, as bad as it is, likely [fails] to fall into the narrow set of claims permitted" by the statute, said Prof. Bradley. "This is the very thing that international law describes as criminal," responded Mr. Anderson. "You have priests conspiring to give refuge for over 25 years to a serial sex abuser." The suit comes at a difficult time for the Catholic Church, which has been hit in recent weeks with claims that its leaders in the Vatican failed to stop priests who were known pedophiles from continuing to serve. The Vatican has denied wrongdoing. —José de Córdoba contributed to this article.
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