Month: July 2011

The Roman Catholic church’s liability for the wrongdoings of its priests is being tested in a high court hearing that could have a significant impact on clerical sexual abuse cases.

Mr Justice MacDuff has been asked to decide if the relationship between a bishop and a priest is similar to that between employers and their staff.

The case has arisen after a woman, known as JGE, brought a case against the diocese of Portsmouth, alleging that one of its priests had abused her while she was a resident at a Catholic children’s home, The Firs, in Waterlooville, Hampshire. The three-day hearing, which started yesterday, will not focus on the abuse claims but on the issue of corporate liability.

She claims Father Wilfrid Baldwin was able to gain access to The Firs and have contact with its residents through his work as a priest. According to her lawyers, Baldwin’s duties establish a connection between the church and the priest.

“In effect, priests are carrying out their working assigned to them by their bishop and furthering the cause of the diocese,” Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel QC, counsel for the woman, argued. “As the correspondence between Father Baldwin and his bishop demonstrates, he was dependent on the bishop to assign him a post and to control when he moved from one post to another and even to control when he was permitted to retire. The degree of control was, if anything, in excess of that in the typical employer/employee relationship.”

The issue to be determined, Gumbel said, was whether the church “can ever be vicariously liable in any situation for any tort at all”. It was, she added, “a very wide issue indeed”.

Lawyers for the alleged victim say it is the first time a court has been asked to rule on whether the “relationship between a Catholic priest and his bishop is akin to an employment relationship”.

If the answer was “yes” then the next issue would be whether the priest was carrying out the actions complained of in circumstances that were “closely connected” with his role and/or work as a priest.

If the answer was “no” there would be “no circumstances where the Roman Catholic church is liable for the actions of one of its priests whether deliberate or careless and however closely connected those actions were to the role of priest”.

Gumbel told the judge this would place the church “in a unique position as far as avoiding responsibility for the acts or omissions of any priest working within the church organisation in whatever role”.

Although the point to be decided has arisen in a damages action over alleged sex abuse, any decision will affect other types of claims made against the church.

The diocese denies it is vicariously liable and is defending itself against the claim. A ruling in its favour would mean the church could avoid paying compensation to victims of clerical sexual abuse.

The woman’s solicitor, Tracey Emmott, said in a statement that the church claimed the relationship “between the bishop of the diocese and the parish priest in question does not amount to anything akin to a relationship of employment and therefore there cannot be any ‘vicarious’ responsibility for the priest’s acts”.

The hearing continues.

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The Vatican is turning to the Internet in its struggle against child abuse with a new website allowing clergy around the world to share information on eradicating the problem.

A key figure behind the initiative is German psychologist priest Hans Zollner from the Vatican’s Gregorian University, who spoke to AFP about the need for fundamental changes in how the Catholic Church handles abuse cases.

“Bishops have to give priority to victims,” said Zollner, a member of the order of Jesuits, often seen as intellectuals inside the Church.

“People working inside dioceses and religious orders should be taught to listen to them. All complaints have to be taken seriously,” he said.

Zollner’s university will host a conference next February at which the new e-learning centre is expected to be launched, with some 200 experts, diocesan officials and representatives of congregations attending.

It will be “a step … on a long and painful path,” Zollner said, adding the website would bring together the latest research on child abuse and Church laws, while allowing churches in different countries to have their say.

The website will be in five languages — English, French, German, Italian and Spanish — and the project is funded to last three years.

The Church is struggling to deal with rising anger and a string of lawsuits following thousands of abuse claims in Europe and the United States.

But many in the Church are concerned that the cases uncovered so far may only be the tip of the iceberg since abuses in much of the developing world — including in Africa and Latin America — have so far received little attention.

Pope Benedict XVI’s ever stronger denunciations of abuse are bringing some changes, however, and national bishops conferences around the world are set to come up with common guidelines against paedophiles by May 2012.

Zollner explained the process is slow and complex because of wide variations in national laws and the need for international coordination.

“The general sensitivity to the problem has clearly increased,” he said.

“But the Church is not a monolithic block. Sensitivities are very different. A critical point appears to have been reached,” he added.

“Many bishops are now saying: ‘We have to act’. There needs to be a more consistent and coordinated response as wanted by the Holy Father.”

The common agreement in the Church is that those responsible “must receive their punishment according to Church law and criminal law,” he said.

Among the changes Zollner has been working on, is stricter psychological tests for would-be priests to identify possible abusers.

The e-learning centre will make use of research from the child and adolescent psychiatry department at Ulm university in Germany, he said.

Abuse victims groups have accused the Vatican of failing to take the problem of paedophilia seriously early on, of not cooperating with police and allowing priests and bishops who covered up for abusers to go unpunished.

“For almost all victims, the most important thing is to be heard by a representative of the institution whose members have hurt them,” Zollner said.

Victims “should have the chance to express all their pain, anger, depression and fears to an official representative of the Church,” he added.

“The pope’s stance is there should no longer be priests who are protected and moved along. The Church must no longer give the impression it is shielding the perpetrators as it has often been seen as doing in the past,” he said.

The Jesuit father added: “It makes the victims suffer a second time.”

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THE CLOYNE report may be published next week.

Prepared by the Murphy commission, it follows an investigation into the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations by church and State authorities over a 13-year period in the Catholic diocese of Cloyne.

Yesterday Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said it was “likely the report can be brought before Cabinet on Tuesday week and be published very shortly thereafter.”

Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s This Week programme he indicated the delay in publication of the report was due to “a long-drawn-out process of consultation involving lawyers who had an interest in the matter”.

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The completed report was presented to the former minister for justice Dermot Ahern on December 23rd last.

Its findings concern clerical child sex abuse allegations made between January 1st, 1996, when the Catholic Church in Ireland first introduced child protection guidelines, and February 1st, 2009.

It was ordered by the government in January 2009 after publication the previous month of a report on the Cloyne diocesan website that found child protection practices there were “inadequate and in some respects dangerous”.

That report had been prepared by the church’s own child protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children.

The government extended the remit of the Murphy commission to include Cloyne.

The commission at the time was also investigating the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations against a sample 46 priests in the Dublin archdiocese.

It published that Dublin report in November 2009.

Its Cloyne report contains 26 chapters, is about 400 pages long, and includes findings on all 19 priests who faced abuse allegations there over the 13-year period investigated.

On April 8th last, president of the High Court Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns decided parts of the report should not be published pending the outcome of criminal proceedings against one priest.