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In announcing which cases it would take during its next term, the Supreme Court said Monday that it would let stand a lower-court ruling allowing the Vatican to be sued over the church sex-abuse scandal...
Church sex-abuse lawsuit can continue
In declining to stop a lawsuit that accuses the Vatican of conspiring with U.S. church officials to cover up sex abuse, the court took a rare step toward bringing the Holy See into a U.S. courtroom.
The justices, without comment, declined the Vatican's appeal of a lower-court ruling that said it could be sued in a U.S. court on certain grounds. The decision came in a lawsuit filed by a man who said he was sexually abused as a teenager in 1965 by a priest in Portland, Ore. His attorneys said the church moved the priest among different assignments to cover up the abuse.
The Vatican argued that its status as a foreign country exempts it from being sued in a U.S. court, a longtime position that has helped shield it from such lawsuits.
In partially rejecting that argument, the Supreme Court allowed pretrial discovery in the case to go forward, and attorneys for the plaintiff said they would seek to subpoena church documents and call Vatican officials under oath. But attorneys for both sides said they doubted that the decision would trigger a flood of additional lawsuits from victims.
"We are not foreseeing that. You really have to have specific facts and a pattern that implicates direct Vatican involvement to bring these cases," said Jeff Anderson, an attorney for the plaintiff and for hundreds of other people who say they were sexually abused by priests.
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