Catholic Church: Public nuisance in America?

A handful of ambitious state attorneys general could get the ball rolling on this, just as they did with the class action litigation against BigTobacco.  For those who need to brush on how that game-changer came to be, a useful read is "Kings of Tort" by Alan Lange and Tom Dawson.   The "this" I'm referring to is alleging that the Roman Catholic Church in America has been a public nuisance.  Here is an ebook I published anti-public nuisance when I was covering lead paint litigation Download Publicnuisancevoodoo.  And, as many lawyers know, public nuisance is thriving on the environmental legal front.

The grounds to alleging a public nuisance in terms of the Catholic Church are seemingly much more solid than those which gave rise to myriad lead paint state suits, ranging from Rhode Island to Ohio.  One is pending in California Download H031540. 

For example, consider the havoc in just one state - Connecticut.  On December 1, 2009, the CT Diocese of Bridgeport was forced by a state court, after three separate motions to the U.S. Supreme Court, to turn over 12,000 pages of discovery documents to the media.  That material was associated with the Diocese's settlement of more than 20 clergy sex abuse lawsuits.  As in Watergate, the issue has been not so much the transgressions but the seeming cover-ups.  But both the alleged crimes against children and the ham-handed attempts to conceal them should be of great interest to alert AGs.  It might also be of equally great interest to global courts.  The issue has been posed: Should the Vatican be held accountable for the sex abuse?

There is also the Church's rigid ideology against birth control, ranging from artificial means of contraception to abortion.  It lost a big one in the health care debate.  The possible public nuisance generated by this stance includes overpopulation, unwanted children who were abused and/or neglected and the strain on all government systems from that, and sexual problems which could have led to criminal behavior. 

In addition, what about the current investigation of the beliefs and lifestyles of American Roman Catholic nuns?  They in themselves should be the first in line to fight for certification of a class action lawsuit.

Such litigation could send a message to all religions, around the world, to not inflict harm on society. 

Full Disclosure:  I was a Catholic.   My first novel focuses on just some of that.  The Catholic Family is following me on twitter @gggggg1. 

Comments

[Bob Lawson]

I have no problem with you taking legal action against those individuals who are guilty of a crime, but you are wrong to put all Catholics on trial. There are many more good, faithful Catholics than there are bad ones. If you don't agree with the Catholic Church's teachings on various subjects, fine, you don't have to agree. But other people also have the right to believe those teachings if they choose. Finally, you need to track and prosecute guilty individuals from all walks of life, not just Catholic priests. Actually, more cases of abuse occur within families, so are you going to outlaw marriage and parenthood?

[Stephen Armiger]

I am struck by the similarity of the actions of the catholic church to protect its own - being clergy, not children, and that of the United States Army in the case of My Lai. Those like Father Thomas Doyle are ostracized just as Hugh Thompson was ostracized. Very few in history have the courage to stand up. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is remembered because he stood up and spoke truth to power even as the then Pope was colluding with Hitler. I have heard it said that if Jesus was not a god, his death was worthless. I disagree. Spartacus is a hero even if he was crucified. God or man, Jesus is a hero even if he was crucified. The sad thing is that the Roman Catholic Church is corrupt. Whitened sepulcre full of dead men's bones.

[Sharen Keim]

I have no legal training, but I'd think that possibly some lawyers could sue the Catholic Church using the flip-side of the rights that Catholic leaders are always demanding, that they have the legal immunity that leaders of foreign states get. The flip-side of this would be that these same leaders have the responsibilities of leaders of a foreign state. Whenever pedo-priests molested kids, and possibly their bishops enabled them, they were acting as agents of the Catholic Church, i.e. a foreign country, so these were agents of a foreign country, attacking Americans. As Alan Dershowitz wrote in The Abuse Excuse, to try to excuse crimes by saying that a defendant had a certain characteristic or life history that made him commit the crime, might seem to give him an advantage, but the flip-side of that is that if people with that characteristic, life history, etc., are not responsible, then they're also irresopnsible, and you can't trust any of them not to commit the same crime. Likewise, the status as a foreign country might seem so good that the Catholic Church uses it whenever possible, but the flip-side is that we must make sure that such foreign countries don't aggress on us.