Vermont's Catholic Church, two months after it was found liable in the first priest misconduct case to reach a Vermont jury, will pay $170,000 to settle the most recent case. It faces more than two dozen similar lawsuits.The statewide Roman Catholic Diocese was set to defend itself Monday in the Chittenden Superior Court case of John Perrotte, a 41-year-old South Hero man who charged the church with negligent supervision of the former Rev. Alfred Willis, a priest in Burlington, Montpelier and Milton before he was defrocked in 1985.
Perrotte, once a parishioner of Milton's St. Ann Church, alleges that Willis kissed him on the lips at age 13 and later groped him when the two were sleeping in a tent on the boy's 14th birthday in 1980 — two years after the diocese, according to its records, learned Willis had sexually abused youth elsewhere but transferred him without warning anyone.
As late as Friday, lawyers for both sides were preparing to argue the Perrotte case before a 12-member jury in Burlington this week. The last-minute settlement changed that.
"Bishop Salvatore Matano deeply regrets any hurt that John Perrotte has experienced because of the actions of Alfred Willis," the diocese said in a written statement. "Bishop Matano is still more pained that this sad circum-stance has alienated Mr. Perrotte from the family of the Church. The Bishop sincerely prays for John Perrotte and all victims of sexual abuse."
Perrotte accepted the settlement — but not the bishop's statement.
"What he asked for was the diocese to take responsibility and apologize to him for what it permitted its priest to do," Perrotte's lawyer, Jerome O'Neill of Burlington, said Saturday. "He didn't consider what they said an apology — they didn't say this is their fault."
Preparing last week for a possible trial, O'Neill wouldn't say how much his client would seek in compensatory or punitive damages. But lawyers for both sides knew the church has paid out both large and small amounts in previous civil lawsuits regarding Willis.
Four years ago, the diocese paid a then-record $150,000 to settle a case filed by Robert Douglas II, a Burlington man who said the priest sexually abused him when he was 13 in 1979. Then last month, a judge affirmed a $15,000 jury verdict against the church in the case of James Turner, a Northeast Kingdom native who said Willis performed oral sex on him when he was 16 in 1977.
Diocesan lawyers Thomas McCormick of Burlington declined to elaborate on the bishop's statement, although fellow church counsel Kaveh Shahi of Rutland told a reporter before the settlement: "We're denying the diocese was negligent."
The church faced at least one challenge in its attempt to uphold that position. In the Turner case, its lawyers argued the diocese wasn't liable for the alleged 1977 abuse because leaders didn't learn that Willis was "sexually involved" with boys until 1978, after which time, according to its records, it transferred the priest from Montpelier's St. Augustine Church to Milton without telling anyone his history.
Even with settlement of the Perrotte case, the diocese still faces two dozen similar lawsuits. They include 18 cases involving the Rev. Edward Paquette — a former priest in Burlington, Montpelier and Rutland from 1972 to 1978 and subject of a record $965,000 settlement in 2006 — and six other lawsuits involving seven other retired or deceased priests.
Settling all those pending lawsuits could be expensive, as the diocese has paid a total of more than $1.5 million to resolve just six other accusers' filings in the past six years.
Complicating matters for the church, O'Neill, who represents all of the diocese's most recent accusers, filed court papers last week that revealed Bishop Matano had considered suing an Indiana diocese to force it to help pay for the $965,000 settlement involving Paquette.
Paquette had worked as a priest in Indiana for most of the 1960s before asking the Vermont diocese for an assignment. On March 30, 1972, then Bishop Leo Pursley of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., wrote Vermont church leaders about the priest's misbehavior: "The dossier is large and the history is long."
Noting "three homosexual episodes involving young boys," the Indiana bishop suggested Paquette be assigned to an "institutional chaplaincy" rather than a community church so he could minister "with less likelihood of relapse." But the Vermont diocese placed Paquette in several local parishes where he repeatedly abused children.
Three decades later, after Matano agreed to settle with one Burlington accuser for $965,000, the Vermont bishop sought compensation from the Indiana church. In a 2006 letter, Matano said his diocese had projected a "negative verdict" of up to $5 million and added the plaintiff "would have been successful had they pursued a claim for damages against your diocese in this matter."
As Matano saw it, the Indiana church's 1972 correspondence, although noting the priest's problems in the Midwest, "apparently did not share Father Paquette's history" in a prior assignment in Massachusetts.
But the current bishop of the Indiana diocese, John D'Arcy, wrote back to Matano that "the media report that you enclosed" confirmed that the Vermont church, according to its own records, knew about Paquette's earlier problems from the beginning.
"I do not see how we are assisted by imputing words or creating lapses of words in the fashion which supports the cause of your diocese," D'Arcy wrote Matano. "I regret deeply and take very seriously your threat to bring this diocese into civil court. I pray that will not occur."
The Vermont diocese doesn't have insurance for priest misconduct, but says it held a comprehensive liability policy with the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Co. from 1972 to 1978. The church can't find its copy of the policy, however, so it has taken the insurer to court in hopes the company will unearth the paperwork and pay for church legal fees and settlement costs.
U.S. District Court in Burlington has yet to rule on that case. But the former insurer, now part of the St. Paul Travelers Companies, says Perrotte's 1980 charges are outside the policy period, leaving the diocese liable for any settlement.
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