UNITED STATES
Global Post
The Catholic priest and lawyer offers counsel to US nuns battling the Vatican as well as church leaders grappling with the sex abuse crisis.
Dan Ward is by any measure a complex man. The lawyer-priest righteously helps nuns on property matters and how to deal with a Vatican investigation.
A canonist and civil lawyer, he has also done extensive defense work for clergy sex offenders and their communities. He refused interview requests.
“It’s a little like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality — doing good for the nuns, while helping bishops or religious superiors deal with their sex offenders,” said Pat Wall, who was a young protégé to Ward at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota in the early 1980s.
Back then, Father Ward was advising religious communities in the early wave of abuse litigation. He told Wall “to get any case settled before it’s filed. You do not want to get involved in the civil discovery process.”
Ward, who leads the legal team of the Resource Center for Religious Institutes (RCRI), has ended up opposite his former student, Wall, in several civil cases. Ward’s work for nuns, says Wall, has been secondary to “his biggest role in the last 25 years — as a consultant lawyer to various monasteries, dioceses and churches in defending them in cases of sexual abuse. Ward has functioned on every single level on the defense side.”
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