Vatican releases internal files on alleged child abuser
The Vatican took a pre-emptive strike Wednesday and published on the website of Vatican Radio internal files about a priest accused of molesting youngsters in Ireland and the United States.
The Associated Press
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican took a pre-emptive strike Wednesday and published on the website of Vatican Radio internal files about a priest accused of molesting youngsters in Ireland and the United States.
The files published represent a small, selective part of the documentation that a federal judge in Portland, Ore., ordered the Holy See to turn over to U.S. lawyers representing a man who says he was abused by the Rev. Andrew Ronan in Portland. The man, known in court papers as John V. Doe, is seeking to hold the Vatican liable for the abuse.
It is the first time the Holy See, the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, has been forced to turn over documentation in a sex-abuse case.
The partial documentation released Wednesday includes the 1966 case file with Ronan's request to be laicized, or removed from the clerical state, after his superiors learned of accusations that he had molested minors in Ireland.
The Vatican said the files, a few dozen pages, some handwritten and culled from its internal books, prove that the Vatican only learned of Ronan's crimes in 1966, when his order sent Ronan's personnel files to Rome and asked the pope to remove him from the priesthood, a year after the abuse against Doe occurred.
Victims groups have long denounced the secrecy with which the Vatican handles abuse cases and demanded the files of known abusers be released.
The file contains a 1963 letter written by the Chicago-based provincial of the Order of Servants of Mary to the order's headquarters in Rome detailing accusations that Ronan had abused students while he was a teacher at the Servites' Our Lady of Benburb Priory in Ireland.
The provincial wrote that he had "removed" Ronan immediately from Ireland after discovering the abuse accusations in 1959. Ronan began working in Chicago and was later transferred to Portland. He died in 1992.
While the letter does not mention Vatican involvement in the transfer, it clearly implicates the Servites in placing a known child molester in a Chicago high school, St. Philip's. Vatican attorney Jeffrey Lena said the files show that the Holy See didn't learn of the accusations against Ronan until 1966, after the abuse against Doe occurred in Portland and after the laicization request was sent to Rome. He said the Vatican was releasing "all known documents relating to Ronan held by the Roman Curia" to help the Oregon court determine the remaining jurisdictional question in the case: whether Ronan was an employee of the Holy See, which is critical to determining whether the Vatican can be held liable for the abuse Doe endured.
The Vatican says religious orders, and not the Vatican, are entirely responsible for transferring their priests around the world, just as individual dioceses are responsible for transferring diocesan priests from place to place.
Lena said Doe's attorney, Jeffrey Anderson, never had any evidence to support his "calumnious accusations" that the Vatican itself had transferred Ronan to Portland while knowing that he posed a danger to minors.
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