Vatican asks court to dismiss suit
Louisville case charges sex abuse


By Gregory A. Hall
ghall@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal


The Roman Catholic Church is asking a U.S. District judge in Louisville to dismiss a lawsuit against the Vatican that alleges a cover-up to protect priests who molested American children.

In four motions and supporting memorandums, the Vatican asks Judge John G. Heyburn II to dismiss the suit, which Louisville attorney William McMurry filed last year on behalf of three men alleging abuse as far back as 1928.

McMurry, who in 2003 represented 243 abuse victims in reaching a $25.7 million settlement with the Archdiocese of Louisville, is seeking to have the suit certified as a class-action case, alleging that "several thousand" victims exist nationwide.

The filings this week by attorneys for the Holy See, the legal identity of the Vatican, allege numerous problems with the suit and represent the church's first in-depth response.

The response argues, for example, that:

The suit should be dismissed because it fails to cite specific actions by the Vatican in regard to the abusive priests. The Vatican also says the complaint does not have enough specifics about the alleged abuse -- times, places and other circumstances -- to proceed.

McMurry did not comply with requirements in U.S. law that must be followed for a foreign country to be sued. The Vatican, which occupies a 109-acre enclave of Rome, is recognized as a sovereign state with legal protections.

McMurry provided a "misleading" translation of documents in the suit into Latin, a Vatican language.

Those flaws require the suit to be dismissed, said attorneys for the church, who include Louisville's John David Dyche, who writes a twice-a-month editorial column for The Courier-Journal.

McMurry, who is out of town, was unavailable for comment yesterday.

His associate, Ross Turner, said most of the arguments made by the church were expected.

"I think I was probably most taken aback by the claim that our translated complaint, which we spent $15,000 to have translated into Latin, has been so vigorously challenged as an unacceptable Latin translation," Turner said. "I believe that there are genuine issues that the court needs to address, but that isn't one of them."

On the Latin issue, one church filing said, "the errors appearing throughout the translations failed to meet the standards of even first-year Latin students; the translator persistently rendered sentences meaningless by garbling case endings, using words that did not exist, using words that do exist incorrectly and failing to adhere to the basic rules of Latin grammar."

To bolster its argument, the church filed a statement by an examiner it used, Charles J. Reid, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.

As an example of the errors, Reid said, "Louisville does not translate into Latin as 'Villa Louis.' "

In documents produced by the Archdiocese of Louisville in now-settled lawsuits filed by McMurry clients in Jefferson Circuit Court, Louisville is referred to as "Ludovicopolitani" and "Ludovicopolitanae."

Among other cited problems, the Vatican argues that federal law bars punitive damages, which McMurry is seeking, against a foreign country.

The church also argues that the suit was sent to the wrong Vatican official. U.S. law requires it be sent to the Vatican's foreign minister, but it was sent to the "secretariat of state."

The Vatican also argues that allowing the suit to proceed would violate the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom.

Additionally, the church argues that priests are not "employees," and that any abuse would have been outside any supervision that church leadership had over the priests.

"Plaintiffs do not allege any facts supporting the notion that the Holy See had a duty to parishioners in Louisville, Kentucky, with regard to the acts of the alleged abusive priests," one of the arguments states. "Plaintiffs do not allege that the Holy See was even aware of the identity of the individual priests, much less that the Holy See knew that the priests posed a danger to others."

The church also argues that the claims, which include allegations of abuse as old as the 1920s, are barred by a one-year statute of limitations.

Legal scholars have said McMurry faces towering obstacles in what they have said is the first sexual-abuse suit to name the Vatican as sole defendant and what would be the first class-action suit against the Vatican regarding sexual abuse.

One of the three plaintiffs is Michael Turner of Louisville, who also filed the first in a wave of roughly 250 lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Louisville between 2002 and 2003.

Turner was molested by the now-imprisoned Rev. Louis E. Miller in the 1970s, when Turner attended St. Aloysius Church in Pewee Valley. Miller was removed from the priesthood last year by the late Pope John Paul II after pleading guilty in 2003 to sexually abusing children in Jefferson and Oldham counties.

The other two plaintiffs, James H. O'Bryan and Donald E. Poppe, have not settled with any diocese, McMurry has said. Both live in California and say they were abused by priests while growing up in Louisville.

O'Bryan contends he was abused by a "Father Lawrence" at St. Cecilia Church in western Louisville in 1928. An archdiocesan spokeswoman has said a Rev. Lawrence Kuntz worked at St. Cecelia from 1928 to 1935 and died in 1952.

McMurry has alleged that Poppe was molested by the late Rev. Arthur Wood, who died in 1983 and was named as an abuser by 39 plaintiffs who settled with the archdiocese.


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