Lawsuit against Vatican fails: Dissident priest Thomas Doyle, Contingency lawyer Jeff Anderson,
Anderson employee Patrick Wall, and SNAP lawyer Marci Hamilton

On Monday, The Holy See won an important court victory when a federal judge in Oregon decided that priests are not employees of the Vatican, as plaintiff attorneys suing the Catholic Church had long argued in an important case that was filed over a decade ago.

In April 2002, lawyers Jeff Anderson and Marci Hamilton filed suit against the Holy See on behalf of "John V. Doe," who asserted he that had been abused by Andrew Ronan, a priest who was laicized in 1966 and died in 1992.

Anderson and Hamilton argued that the Vatican should be held liable for John Doe's damages for abuse because Catholic priests are "employees" of the Vatican. But Judge Michael Mosman of the United States District Court in Oregon shot down that claim and outright dismissed the Plaintiff's case.

A good analogy

In granting the Holy See's motion to dismiss the case, Judge Mosman asserted, "There are no facts to create a true employment relationship between Ronan and the Holy See."

Rather, the relationship between a priest and the Vatican is more like the relationship between a lawyer and the state bar. The bar can license, sanction, and disbar attorneys, but by no means is that relationship equivalent to that of an employer and an employee.

Doyle and Wall defeated

Trying to make the case for the Plaintiff that priests are "employees" of the Vatican were dissident Dominican priest Rev. Thomas Doyle, who has worked as a canon lawyer, and Patrick Wall, an employee of Jeff Anderson.

In the end, Judge Mosman did not buy the men's arguments at all.

In addition, in court documents, veteran canon lawyer Dr. Edward N. Peters effectively dismantled and shredded the pair's legal wranglings. Peters flatly determined that their work was "incomplete and misleading in several crucial respects" and contained a number of "significant" mistakes and errors.

[Read Dr. Peters' takedown of the arguments from Doyle, Wall, and the Plaintiff.]

Media disappointment?

The impact of Monday's ruling cannot be overstated. Had the Vatican lost this case, it likely would have faced major monetary damages. A flood of other cases would certainly have followed, and the result of that would be obvious.

And if the Vatican had lost the case, surely it would have been a major story in the media.

Instead, the New York Times rendered this important verdict a modest 145 words on page A11.

Likewise, a lot of news outlets did not give this important decision much attention. The Los Angeles Times, for one, did not even report this important story at all.

Sinful journalism: Joshua J. McElwee

In fact, even a cursory look at the 1985 letter reveals that such a claim is blatantly untrue!

The author of the feckless piece is Joshua J. McElwee, a "staff writer" at the discordant publication.

A simple case muddled by an anti-Church agenda

The case is not very complicated. In 1985, the Archdiocese of Birmingham, England, sent a letter to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles on behalf of one of its priests who wanted to work in the United States.

The letter reportedly stated in part:

"[The cleric's] work as a priest has been highly regarded ever since his ordination fourteen years ago.

"He has shown considerable talent in recruiting groups of lay workers to assist in various capacities …

"Since his ordination he has regularly done summer vacation work in various American parishes and from time to time expressed a desire to join an American Diocese.

"The immediate reason for his being in the United States just now is that a few months ago he met a man with whom he had an unwholesome relationship about thirteen years ago.

"We have no reason to believe that there has been any recurrence of this problem, but [the priest] says that he would feel safer a long distance away and untraceable by this man."

One notices right away that the letter says absolutely nothing about any underage abuse or crime, and there is nothing in the letter that suggests the priest had had any problems with minors. It indicates a priest – likely gay – seeking to get as far away as possible from a source of disruption.

The Church takes immediate action

It turns out, however, that the priest had actually been suspected in England of abusing underage boys. Yet the Archdiocese of Los Angeles did not know this until some five years later, in 1993, when it received another letter from England.

This second letter stated that the priest had been accused of sexual abuse of children, and that he was being recalled home to the UK.

What did the Archdiocese of Los Angeles do? It immediately revoked his faculties and sent him packing back to England.

The archdiocese heard nothing of the guy until 2008, fifteen years after it expelled him, when it received an anonymous phone call saying that the former priest was managing a Southern California trailer park. At that point, even though the guy was a merely a former employee of the Church, it immediately notified the police.

Most notably, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has never received any allegation whatsoever of any sexual wrongdoing by the guy when he was employed in L.A.

Church-haters see an opportunity to bash the Church

But the Reporter's McElwee doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good hit piece on the Church. McElwee lines up the usual suspects of professional Church critics to argue that Los Angeles somehow should have known that the priest from England was a child molester.

McElwee turns to the perpetually angry Church-basher Patrick J. Wall, an employee of the notorious anti-Catholic Southern California contingency lawyer John C. Manly. Wall wildly describes the 1985 letter as a "bunker buster bomb" that could somehow indicate a crime by Cardinal Roger Mahony. Uh-huh. (Wall has passed himself off as a canon law expert even though he reportedly studied less than two months in the field. According to a source in a 2003 article in the Los Angeles Times, Wall was expelled from Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome after forging a letter in an attempt to get a leave from the priesthood. Wall is a former Benedictine.) [UPDATE, 5/13/12: We have since learned that Wall no longer works for John Manly. He now works for ... (drum roll) ... the nation's leading Church-suing attorney Jeff Anderson, from Minnesota!]

McElwee also quotes a member from the predictably hysterical group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) who somehow concludes that "kids were hurt in Los Angeles" because "the archdiocese knew that [the former priest] was a predator," even though there has not been a shred of evidence of any of this.

Indeed, the media has doled out enough fair criticism of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for its past mishandlings of abuse cases. But the Reporter is now scraping the bottom of the barrel and finessing facts in a desperate attempt to wring a story out of some new marginal information.

The Reporter is building a reputation for biased reporting on the abuse narrative, and McElwee's piece comes across as a baseless and sordid swipe at the Catholic Church.

To make matters worse, after the school granted her permission, Berg filmed children with their name tags clearly identifiable. A member of Berg’s crew later admitted that they neither sought nor were given permission to use pictures of the children. When the filmmakers later informed the school that their footage would be used for a film about O’Grady, the school “categorically refused” the request. But what did Berg do? She used the footage anyway.

Especially slanted were interview segments in the film when they dealt with Church and theological issues. The film includes several troubling interview segments with Fr. Thomas Doyle, an alleged Catholic priest. His presentations on issues such as the structure of the Church (a “monarchy”?), the history of the Church, the role of the laity, the training of seminarians, and the Eucharist are simply wrong and are not in alignment with official Church teaching. For example, Fr. Doyle states that the Church’s requirement of celibacy – a big target of the film – “is not justified anywhere in the Gospels or in the life and times and sayings of Christ.” Yet the Bible clearly quotes Jesus praising the gift of celibacy in the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. 19:12), and Paul unequivocally encourages celibacy in his First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 7). That a man espousing to be a Catholic priest could air such a blatant falsehood (in a “documentary,” no less) should be disturbing to any serious Catholic.

Meanwhile, California attorney John Manly airs a number of falsehoods. For example, he claims that the Church teaches, “[I]f you are not in communion with the church you are damned to hell.” A cursory look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 846-848, rebuts this assertion. Meanwhile, the “theologian” of the film, Patrick Wall, doesn’t bother correct Manly. This is no surprise, however, because Wall is actually one of his employees.

PART II: A Fallacious Attack on the Cardinal Mahony

PART III: Even More Factual Errors