VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
by John L Allen Jr on Feb. 11, 2012 NCR Today
ROME — On Friday, lawyers for the victim in a Wisconsin sex abuse case voluntarily withdrew a lawsuit against the Vatican, which had also named Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinals Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State, and Angelo Sodano, his predecessor, as defendants. The case helped ignite a media firestorm in 2010 about the role of Pope Benedict XVI in the sex abuse scandals, suggesting that while he was still a Vatican official he had delayed action against the late Fr. Lawrence Murphy, accused of molesting some 200 boys at a Milwaukee-area school for the deaf between 1950 and 1974.
See also: Explosive sex abuse lawsuit against Vatican dropped
The following is a statement released on Saturday by California-based attorney Jeffrey Lena, who represents the Vatican in American litigation.
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Statement of Jeffrey S. Lena Regarding John Doe 16 v. Holy See, et al.
(Case No. 2:10-cv-00346 RTR, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin)
On February 10, 2012, Jeffrey R. Anderson, Esq. of the law office of Jeff Anderson and Associates, working together with columnist Marci Hamilton, Esq., filed a voluntary notice of dismissal in the case of John Doe 16 v. Holy See.
The Notice of Voluntary Dismissal — which was filed by the Plaintiff’s lawyers to avoid their duty to submit to the Court a court-ordered response to the Holy See’s Motion to Dismiss — requested that the “Court take notice of this dismissal and remove this matter from its docket.”
With these ignominious words, the John Doe 16 case died silently on a Friday afternoon in what attorney Jeff Anderson has himself called “the crucible of the courtroom.”
Things were different at the beginning of this case. On April 22, 2010, counsel for Plaintiff orchestrated a press event replete with props and other trappings designed to induce a media feeding frenzy. During the frenzy, Plaintiff’s counsel dramatically announced that they held information demonstrating a “world-wide conspiracy” related to sexual abuse that was directed by the Holy See. That outworn and discredited claim was in fact the centerpiece of a planned sequence of media events that took a very serious matter — the sexual abuse of a child – and turned it into a tool to assert fallacious allegations of Holy See responsibility and liability for John Doe 16’s abuse.
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