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. Continue reading
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