Sue the Pope, US attorney tells abuse survivors
Clerical immunity must be ended and victims of abuse should sue the Holy See for true justice to be done, an American attorney said in an address to the Humbert Summer School last Friday 20th August. Patrick J. Wall, senior consultant at Manly & Stewart, a Californian firm specialising in sexual abuse litigation, was speaking at the John Healy luncheon debate attended by abuse survivors Marie Collins, Andrew Madden, Michael O’Brien and others.
A former Benedictine monk and priest, Mr Wall is a world-renowned canon lawyer who left the priesthood to work directly on behalf of abuse victims as a civil attorney. He represented victims of the notorious paedophile priest Oliver O’Grady and was highly critical of the Church hierarchy’s reticent and obfuscating approach to the survivors’ claims. He concluded that the Catholic Church is a “monarchical system which cannot police itself”, and that liability for the cover-up of abusing priests ran all the way to the Vatican.
“Child protection is the most important civil rights issue of our time”, Mr Wall remarked, before outlining the four steps he sees as representing a route to pursuing the Holy See. “First of all, we must end clerical immunity. The Irish Constitution removed the special position of the Church in 1972 and yet still not one single Bishop has gone to jail for covering up the abuse of children.
Patrick J. Wall, attorney
If a Bishop does jail time, things will start to change very quickly”.
Wall recommended the enforcement of the offence of misprision of felony, a common law provision which essentially makes it an offence not to report a crime of which one has knowledge – although this has generally been considered to be inoperative since the Criminal Justice Act, 1997 abolished the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours.
The next step was to “get the documents” and construct as clear and detailed a record as possible of the correspondence, notes and diocesan files relating to all abusing priests and clergy. Mr Wall referred to his work with BishopAccountability, a Massachussetts-based non-profit organisation aimed at compiling an archive of evidence of abuse and cover-up in the interests of transparency and justice. He stressed the need for comprehensive and substantial stores of evidence of past abuses from which to build successful civil claims to bring perpetrators to justice. “Monsignor [Francis J.] Weber wrote that the past is the prologue to the future”, Mr Wall recalled.
Thirdly, legal teams for abuse survivors need to “follow the money” , from the use of diocesan funds to silence victims’ families to allowances and payments for treatment and accommodation of known abusers. Following the money trail, Mr Wall argued, would lead one all the way up to the highest circles of power within the Church which is where ultimate liability would lie.
The final stage was to “chase the Holy See”, which he described as a sovereign political state as well as being an extremely wealthy organisation with offices and representatives in over a hundred countries worldwide. Its influence in domestic church matters was often underestimated, Mr Wall commented, and its reach was considerable.
“The Pope has got to pay. Why? He is the head of the Holy See. Priests and religious are agents of the Holy See. It oversees their selection, training, formation, promotion – you name it”.
The question over which court or tribunal would have jurisdiction to hear such an action remained open-ended. Mr Wall suggested several options, including before International Criminal Court which handles offences committed from 2002 onwards, as well as the European Court of Human Rights (the Holy See has EU ‘observer status’ but does not have full membership) which has already considered the obligations on Member States in enforcing ecclesiastical judgments (Pellegrini v Italy, ECtHR, 20 July 2001). As representative of the Holy See to Ireland, Mr Wall said, a summons should be served on the Papal Nuncio.
The likelihood of success of such an approach is open to question. In 2005, a test case in Texas to sue the Pope foundered when then-President George W. Bush, at the behest of the Vatican, successfully claimed ‘head of state immunity’ on behalf of the Pope. Closer to home, there are instant resonances with the scandalous non-cooperation of the Nuncio with the Murphy Commission, who did not respond to requests for documents from the Commission on account of them not originating from ‘standard diplomatic channels’.
Maeve Lewis, executive director of One In Four
Mr Wall was followed by Maeve Lewis, executive director of One In Four, who lambasted the “abysmal and duplicitous response” by the Catholic Church to the Murphy Report. “Not one single figure in Church authority has gone to jail for the wilful protection of abusers of children”, Ms Lewis stated. Remarking that there was an element of “public fatigue” when it came to Church abuse scandals, she decried the lack of political will to try and convict any of the Bishops mentioned in the Murphy Report. The response of ordinary priests, Ms Lewis said, had been little better with the overall impression being of a “spineless, emasculated clergy” who were afraid to speak out boldly and frankly in condemnation of their superiors.
Bernie McDaid
Also speaking was Bernie McDaid, the Boston-born son of Donegal parents, who was abused by a priest when 12 years old, who is organising ‘Reformation Day’ on 31st October in the Vatican. The date is symbolic, as it marks the end of the Vatican’s ‘Year of the Priest’ and is intended to mark the beginning of what Mr McDaid calls the ‘Year of the Survivor’. Mr McDaid called for all victims of abuse, for priests and religious of sympathetic conscience, and supporters of abuse survivors everywhere to either come to Rome to take part or to sponsor an abuse survivor to do so. More details can be found at www.survivorsvoice.org
© Barry Lysaght 2010.
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