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	Vatican Attorney Comments on Supreme Court Decision, Dispels Media Misinterpretations Catholic Culture July 1, 2010 http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=6812 Two days after the US Supreme Court announced that it would not hear the Vatican’s appeal of an Oregon court’s ruling that allowed the Holy See to be listed as a defendant in a sex-abuse lawsuit, Vatican attorney Jeffrey Lena dispelled misinterpretations of the case in the secular media. The Holy See, Mr. Lena told Vatican Radio, is not at risk of bankruptcy, and the Supreme Court did not deny the Holy See sovereign immunity. “What the Supreme Court did was decide that it wasn’t going to address a question which we had wished to bring before it,” Lena said on June 30. “That was a question that on the substantive law I think we were right. The United States [solicitor general] agreed with us, but the Supreme Court simply determined that at this time, it was not interested in hearing the case. The fact that it wasn’t interested in hearing the case, as I say, did not deny immunity and was no comment on the merits of our position.” The clerical abuse victim in the case “surely suffered as no child ever deserves to suffer, and there is no question in this case that this young man was victimized by a priest [Andrew Ronan],” Lena said. “However, responsibility for damages for that suffering, which justly should be paid, falls upon the religious order which supervised him, controlled his activities, and transferred him [the Order of the Servants of Mary]-- not on the Holy See.” Commenting on the argument that the priest who committed abuse was an employee of the Holy See, Mr. Lena added: So the case is presently narrowed down to one issue, which is whether or not the priest in question, Andrew Ronan, was an employee of the Holy See. Now the factors that generally determine whether a person is an employee, include day-to-day control of the person, payment to the person for services rendered, insurance for the person, the understanding of the parties as to whether or not the person is employed, and there are a variety of other factors. None of these factors are met really in this case. This is a priest who was entirely unknown to the Holy See until after the events in question.
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