St. Louis Suit Follows Push toward Transparency in Church Sexual Abuse Claims

By Jennifer S. Mann
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
December 29, 2013

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-louis-suit-follows-push-toward-transparency-in-church-sexual/article_205d6676-43f3-5a2d-b141-287fafdab9b6.html

Basilica.jpg Morning sunlight bathes the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis early on Jan. 24, 2013. Photo by Erik M. Lunsford elunsford@post-dispatch.com

The lawsuit filed by an anonymous Jane Doe against a now-defrocked St. Louis priest echoes thousands of others nationwide that have forced more than $3 billion in legal awards and settlements from the Roman Catholic Church.

But it has particular relevance here because of an added promise: unprecedented disclosure.

Experts on the Catholic Church abuse scandal say Doe’s suit fits with a trend of the last decade or so, in which victims are increasingly pushing for transparency, and not just big payouts.

Timothy Lytton, author of “Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse,” said that when plaintiff’s attorneys began filing suits against the church in the mid-1980s, they were motivated primarily by settlements and limited by judges who were disinclined to grant large discovery requests.

But gradually, over time, he said, three things began happening: The crisis was framed in terms of institutional failure, versus a few “bad apple” priests; lawsuits forced the Catholic Church to divulge information that prosecutors had been politically afraid of demanding; and the scandal gained the focus of major institutions — the church, law enforcement, legislatures and the press.

Starting in the mid 1990s, the country began seeing waves of mass litigation that exposed the full extent of the scandal.

“Judges, just like the rest of America, started to realize this was not just an isolated problem. This was widespread,” Lytton, a professor at Albany Law School in New York, said. “They became much more likely to grant broad discovery requests.”

More and more plaintiffs were making it to the discovery stage, and confidential settlements decreased dramatically. And the pressure on the Catholic Church to tell what it knew when, and how it responded, continued to grow.

According to BishopAccountibility.org, which tracks the abuse crisis, non-monetary settlements are also increasing, with agreements to release documents — for example, in the Los Angeles, San Diego and Portland dioceses (although not all have yet complied).

“The combination of litigation and the world wide web really conspired to crack the secrecy,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of “Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal.”

“If church leaders had established a system for telling the truth 25 years ago,” he added, “they might have saved themselves billions of dollars and a lot of aggravation and a lot of pain, because I think there are a great many people who would have accepted just that.”

jmann@post-dispatch.com 314-621-58040