ST. LOUIS (MO)
Pioneer Press
By Alan Scher Zagier
Associated Press
POSTED: 07/07/2014
The Archdiocese of St. Louis announced a confidential settlement in a priest sex-abuse case scheduled to go to trial Monday but questioned the truth of a 22-year-old woman’s statement that she was molested as a young girl.
The settlement for an undisclosed amount of money in the suit against defrocked Catholic priest Joseph Ross also spared the archdiocese from possible public disclosure of further details on hundreds of abuse complaints against its employees over decades.
The woman, identified in court documents only as Jane Doe, had accused Ross of molesting her as a small girl between 1997 and 2001 while she attended the St. Cronan parish on the city’s south side. The archdiocese announced the settlement just as jury selection in the civil trial was set to begin.
The St. Louis archbishop, Robert J. Carlson, served previously as a bishop in the Twin Cities. From 1979 to 1994 he served as a top handler of priest sexual-abuse cases in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, attorney Jeffrey Anderson said.
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