SEATTLE (WA)
The Catholic Observer [United States]
October 12, 2025
By Gary Gately
The agreement represents a major victory for Catholic bishops, who challenged the law’s constitutionality.
In a major victory for Catholic bishops, the state of Washington has agreed to abandon its effort to force priests to report child abuse they learn of in confession — or face imprisonment for failing to do so.
The state’s agreement Friday came in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma by the bishops of the Washington’s three Catholic dioceses in which they pointed out that the law would force priests to break the seal of confession, which results in automatic excommunication, to report abuse, or face up to 364 days imprisonment and a $5,000 fine for breaking the law.
A federal judge had issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law days before it was to take effect on July 27, saying that requiring priests to report child abuse revealed during confession violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom by placing priests in the “position of either complying with the requirements of their faith or violating the law.”
In their lawsuit, filed three weeks after Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson, a Catholic, signed the measure into law on May 2, the bishops of the state’s three Catholic dioceses argued that it violates the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
The law, the bishops said, represented a “brazen act of religious discrimination,” adding: “Without any basis in law or fact, Washington now puts Roman Catholic priests to an impossible choice: violate 2,000 years of Church teaching and incur automatic excommunication or refuse to comply with Washington law and be subject to imprisonment, fine, and civil liability.”
The law added clergy to “mandatory reporters” of child abuse, including school counselors, police, healthcare workers, social workers and nurses.
Attorneys representing the bishops noted that the law exempts other professionals such as lawyers from the requirement to report child abuse or neglect to authorities if they obtain the information through their representation of a client.
Jean Hill, executive director of the Washington State Catholic Conference, which represents the state’s bishops on public policy issues, praised the state’s agreement not to enforce the law’s provision forcing clergy to report child abuse they learn of during confession.
“Preventing abuse and upholding the sacred seal of confession are not mutually exclusive — we can and must do both,” Hill said in a statement. “That’s why the Church supported the law’s goal from the beginning and only asked for a narrow exemption to protect the sacrament. We’re grateful the state ultimately recognized it can prevent abuse without forcing priests to violate their sacred vows.”
Hill said the state’s three dioceses have already adopted policies to protect children that go beyond the requirements of existing state law on reporting child abuse and neglect. The policies, she said, mandate reporting suspected abuse by clergy and other Church personnel except when it is revealed during confession, according to the lawsuit.
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown pointed out that clergy will still be “mandatory reporters” of abuse they learn about outside the sacrament of reconciliation.
The agreement “maintains important protections for children” by retaining “crucial portions of Washington’s mandatory reporting law in place, while also preserving the Legislature’s authority to address issues with the law,” Brown said in a statement.
Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket, a conservative religious liberties law firm and member of the legal team representing the bishops, called the state’s agreement “a victory for religious freedom and for common sense.”
“Priests should never be forced to make the impossible choice of betraying their sacred vows or going to jail,” Rienzi added in a statement.
Ferguson’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
After signing the legislation in May, Ferguson, who is Catholic, said: “Protecting our kids, first, is the most important thing. This bill protects Washingtonians from abuse and harm.”
A group of Orthodox churches and an Orthodox priest also filed a June lawsuit challenging the law, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops filed an amicus brief in late July in support of the Washington bishops. The USCCB quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which says the seal of confession is “inviolable” and that “it is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason.”
Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry, also filed a brief in support of the Washington bishops. “If a penitent is aware the priest might (let alone must) share with others what was given in the most sacred confidence, he or she would be reluctant indeed to ever approach confession,” Barron wrote.
And the U.S. Justice Department and a group of over 500 Catholic priests and deacons in the U.S., Australia and the United Kingdom supported the bishops in their challenge. In early May, the Trump administration’s Justice Department launched an investigation into what it characterized as the “anti-Catholic” law, which it said “appears on its face to violate the First Amendment” guarantee of religious freedom.
About 30 U.S. states now include clergy among mandatory reporters, though all but a handful of them include exceptions for information about abuse shared during confession.
Over the centuries, priests have been imprisoned, tortured and even killed for upholding the seal of confession, and the Washington bishops argued that penitents must be assured that priests will not violate it.
The Washington state law’s stipulation that clergy must report abuse revealed in confession received the backing of a broad array of organizations representing clergy sexual abuse victims, Catholic and Jewish clergy, Native American tribes, law enforcement, crisis counselors and children’s advocates.
Mary Dispenza, a co-founder of the Catholic Accountability Project, which lobbied for the law’s passage, criticized the state’s decision to abandon its effort to force priests to report child abuse they learn of in confession.
“Shame on the Catholic Church and our AG, governor and the federal judge,” Dispenza told The Catholic Observer. “I wonder, if they have children, would they want the priest to keep this secret from them?”
Dispenza — a former nun and member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) — said she had been sexually abused by a priest repeatedly as a young child by a priest at an East Los Angeles parish beginning in 1947. Years later, at age 18, she told a priest in confession about the abuse, but he never reported the abuser, Father George Neville Rucker, and at least 38 others alleged Rucker had sexually abused them as children over the course of three decades, according to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Rucker, who died in May 2014, had been criminally charged in 2002 with 29 counts of sexual abuse of minors, but prosecutors in Los Angeles dropped charges against him the following year, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California law extending the statute of limitations on sexual crimes against children.
“I feel betrayed again and again,” Dispenza said. Because the priest she told about Rucker’s abuse never reported it, she said, he went on to sexually abuse more than 30 girls.
“This is the outcome of the priests’ privilege to not report crimes shared in confession,” she said. “Is this what priests want for God’s children — pain and suffering? Our leaders, Governor Ferguson and AG Nick Brown caved and gave up on fighting the powerful Catholic Church. How sad.”