MINNESOTA
Star Tribune
Article by: EMMA NELSON , Star Tribune Updated: January 18, 2015
Bankruptcy halts clergy abuse cases, with victims watching for signs of change.
After nearly four decades, Bob Rich can still draw a map of the room where it happened.
He was 12 years old when a priest who was a visiting speaker at his school took him to lunch, sneaked him into an R-rated movie and then drove him back to the rectory and sexually abused him. The abuse continued until the summer before Rich left for college, all within a few miles of the Minnetonka neighborhood where he grew up.
After years spent away from Minnesota, a recent return has brought with it the flashbacks that Rich has tried for years to escape. He calls them “land mines,” and they’re everywhere: the wooded road where it happened for the last time, inside a parked car. News stories detailing the latest abuse revelations. The sound of church bells.
“You cannot escape it,” he said. “It’s like breathing air.”
Rich and other survivors of clergy sexual abuse across the nation are watching events unfold in the Twin Cities, with reactions to Friday’s bankruptcy filing ranging from hope to frustration.
“I believe very strongly that we are positioned in a way today to make sure the survivors are treated fairly and equitably,” said Jeff Anderson, the St. Paul attorney handling most of the Twin Cities clergy sexual abuse cases, at a news conference Friday.
But some survivors who have already gone through the legal process, either in Minnesota or elsewhere, say they’re apprehensive about what will happen here.
“What that does is it puts a stop to everything,” said Joelle Casteix, Western regional director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “These diocese … always pitch it as a very humane way to treat everyone fairly, but their No. 1 goal is to keep their secrets hidden.”
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