VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio
Attorneys for the victim in a Wisconsin sex abuse case voluntarily withdrew a lawsuit against the Holy See on Friday, in which Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinals Tarcisio Bertone and Angelo Sodano, the Secretary of State and Secretary of State-emeritus, respectively, were named as defendants. The case was at the centre of media attention in 2010, when reporters inquired into the role of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the prosecution of a priest accused of abusing as many as 200 boys at Milwaukee-area school for the deaf between 1950 and 1974.
The following is a statement released on Saturday by California-based attorney Jeffrey Lena, who represents the Vatican in US litigation.
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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