It's been a rough couple days for the Vatican. Last week, in Belgium, police raided Catholic Church offices as part of an investigation of child rape cases. The Pope had a hissy fit over that.
And, today, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Vatican's appeal of a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which determined that the Vatican can be sued the sexual abuse perpetrated by of one of its employees, a Catholic priest:
The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to consider whether the Vatican has legal immunity over the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the United States, allowing a lawsuit filed in 2002 to go forward.Let's just say, the Vatican is done deep pocket. And, the Pope has been acting like the Vatican and its resources are off-limits to lawsuits. Not anymore.
The nation's highest court, asked to rule on a U.S. appeals court decision that cleared the way for the lawsuit to proceed, rejected the Vatican's immunity appeal without comment.
The lawsuit, filed by a plaintiff identified only as John Doe, claimed he was sexually abused on several occasions in the mid-1960s when he was 15 or 16 by a Roman Catholic priest named Father Andrew Ronan.
According to court documents, Ronan molested boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in Ireland and then in Chicago before his transfer to a church in Portland, Oregon, where he allegedly abused the victim who filed the lawsuit. Ronan died in 1992.
How do you think Benedict will hold up in a deposition?
