For the first time ever, a civilian court judge has ordered the Vatican to produce documents and answer questions under oath about its role in supervising a priest accused of a long pattern of child sex abuse.
The Vatican has argued that while it may have spiritual authority over priests, temporal issues such as employment are the purview of local dioceses and religious orders.
[Judge] Mosman gave the Vatican until June 20 to respond to the order to produce documents and answer a number of questions about Ronan [the alleged abuser] and the Church's general policies on the laicization of priests
The order embraces that the core issue -- in fact the sole issue in the case -- is whether he[Ronan] was an employee of the Holy See at the time of the events. That, he was not," Lena [Vatican attorney] said in a recent telephone interview
"If they were able to establish that there were an employment relationship it would be devastating to the Vatican, because obviously they have many more resources than any one diocese would," Zech said.
Eight US dioceses have been bankrupted by clergy sex abuse lawsuits, including the diocese of Portland, Oregon where the Ronan case is being tried.
But even if the plaintiffs fail to hold the Vatican liable in this case, the ruling has created a legal precedent which will make it easier to draw the Holy See further into clergy sex abuse cases.
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