Supreme Court Declines Vatican Sex-Abuse Appeal

(June 28) -- The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to review a lawsuit that challenges the Vatican's immunity from prosecution in clerical sex abuse cases.

Minnesota lawyer Jeffrey Anderson, who filed the case in 2002, called the high court's decision to allow the lawsuit to go forward "an enormous breakthrough for the movement of sex abuse survivors."

"The Vatican has hidden behind a wall of immunity and acted as if they are above the law," Anderson told AOL News today. "Now we have a crack in that wall, and we will move forward in our fight against the Vatican."

Anderson said the court's decision paves the way for victims of sex abuse to sue the Vatican on the grounds that priests are employees of the Holy See.

But Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican's U.S. lawyer, disagreed sharply with Anderson on the impact of the high court's action.

"It's wrong to assume that just because the Supreme Court didn't hear the case, that they are not on our side," Lena told AOL News.

The Vatican, which contends that American priests are not its employees, wanted the case thrown out on the basis that it's a sovereign state with immunity. The Holy See has had diplomatic relations with the U.S. since 1984.

The plaintiff in the case is a 49-year-old Seattle-area man, identified as John Doe, who said he was abused as a teenager on numerous occasions by the Rev. Andrew Ronan, an alleged pedophile, in Portland, Ore.

The lawsuit accuses the Vatican of conspiring with U.S. clergy to transfer Ronan, who died in 1992, between Ireland and parishes in Chicago and Oregon despite knowing that Ronan had sexually abused minors.

Anderson, who has brought numerous sexual abuse cases against Catholic priests, said he may depose Pope Benedict XVI as the discovery phase of the lawsuit goes ahead. No one has ever successfully sued the Vatican for clerical sexual abuse.

Lena, the Vatican's lawyer, said, "The issue before the court today was a very small part of the case involving the scope of the [priest's] employment."

Lena said the key issue in the case, as it returns to U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, is whether or not Ronan could be considered an employee of the Vatican. The Vatican will argue that American priests are not employees of the Vatican and the Holy See is not legally responsible for them.

"There's like 500,000 priests out there all over the world," Lena said. "The Holy See didn't even know this guy until after the events in question."

Ronan's sexual abuse of boys began in the mid-1950s as a priest in the Archdiocese of Armagh, Ireland, according to the lawsuit. He was transferred to Chicago, where he admitted abusing three boys at St. Philip's High School.

Ronan was later transferred to St. Albert's Church in Portland, where he was accused of abusing the man who filed the lawsuit now under appeal.

Monday's Supreme Court decision came just as Pope Benedict issued a blunt rebuke to two senior clerics for making accusations against each other in public.

The Vatican released a statement today saying the pope had censured Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, who last month criticized the powerful Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano for allegedly blocking an investigation into sexual abuse by former Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer.

On Sunday, Benedict angrily denounced last week's extraordinary raids on the headquarters of the Belgian Church and the digging up of two tombs of archbishops as "surprising and deplorable" in a letter to the head of the Belgian Bishops Conference.