I have an op-ed in today’s National Review Online:
Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States this week will be the first papal visit since the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal broke in 2002. Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican’s top diplomat in the United States, expresses confidence that the pope will address the scandal while here. Trial lawyers, however, having been asking legislatures for years to address the problem in their own particular way: more lawsuits. That proposed solution, through undoing statutes of limitations and permitting new lawsuits over long-ago crimes, creates more problems than it solves, and hurts more than just the actors responsible for those crimes.
Reviver legislation is pending in six states, and has been proposed in many more.
One Comment
There were claims that a substantial number of POW/MIA soldiers were left behind in Viet Nam. When no evidence emerged to justify the claims, the lack of evidence became proof that the Communists had put the POW/MIA’s in hidden camps and caves. (Similarly for WMDs is Iraq.) Not one such POW/MIA has ever been found. NOT ONE AT ALL. Yet every spring for many years fellows on motor cycles would encircle the Capitol to remind America of the POW/MIA issue.
Then there was the spat of day-care center cases. As of now all of the well studied cases have been shown to be the result of suggestion and hysteria – ALL OF THEM! These cases equaled the Salem Witch trials but without capital punishments.
Wouldn’t the rational presumption in the Priest Scandal be that claims came from imagination and suggestion fueled by pots of gold?
There was an actual test of the validity of the claims, which test shows the claims to be bogus in bulk. The test consisted of the trials of two priests in Boston John J. Geoghan and Paul R. Shanley. Father Geoghan may have grabbed the buttocks of a ten year old boy in a swimming pool. Geoghan was sentenced to four and one half years for that, and he was beaten to death in prison. This was disgusting.
The testimony in Shanley’s trial mirrored the fantastic tails in the day-care center cases. It was incredible by its nature. Shanley was also convicted.
Ted Frank is to be praised to the high heavens for showing some of the problems in the Priest Scandal. But he understates the case. It was ALL hoax.
One of the girls a in the day-care case claimed for many sessions that nothing occurred at the day care. The psychologists working with her wore her down and got her to claim all kinds of molestations. That girl grew up and now swears that she was actually molested. Verbal testimony in both the day-care cases and the Priests Scandal is absolutely worthless.
If one knows the law like Ted Frank, the psychology of the day care cases like Ms. Dorothy Rabinovitz, and the mass insanity of the POW/MIA issue, the breast implant issue, and the thimerosal issues, then it is absolutely clear that the priest controversy was a total hoax.