The United States Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport to delay the court-ordered release of thousands of legal documents from lawsuits filed against priests accused of child sex abuse. The decision leaves few options for the diocese after a seven-year tug-of-war with four newspapers, including The New York Times, over the release of more than 12,000 pages of depositions and church records.
The diocese still has another request before the court, asking the justices to hear arguments that release of the records would violate the First Amendment rights accorded to religious groups.
But such a hearing appears unlikely after the court’s refusal on Monday, in a single-sentence ruling, to stay a lower-court order that the records be unsealed.
A spokesman for the Bridgeport Diocese said in a statement: “We are disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to extend the stay. For more than a decade, the Catholic Church in Bridgeport has addressed the issue of clergy sexual abuse compassionately and comprehensively. For now, however, the serious threat to the First Amendment rights of all churches and the rightful privacy of all litigants remain in jeopardy because of the decision of the Connecticut Supreme Court. This, indeed, is regrettable."
The records were obtained by plaintiffs in 23 lawsuits filed against the diocese and seven of its priests in the 1990s, during the tenure of Bishop Edward M. Egan, who was later named the archbishop of New York.
They were sealed in 2001 after the diocese reached settlements with the plaintiffs, former altar boys and youth group members who said they were molested by priests in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s.
Although those cases occurred before Bishop Egan’s arrival, advocates for abuse victims say that as bishop of Bridgeport, he shuffled priests accused of abuse from parish to parish. He has said he followed the standard practice of the time: sending priests accused of abuse to psychiatric institutions and returning them to parish work only after they had been cleared for duty by mental health professionals.
In 2002, The Times filed suit, seeking the release of the records. It was later joined by The Hartford Courant, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. In June, the Connecticut Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings, ordering the documents released.
In its last-ditch appeal to the United States Supreme Court, filed in August, the Bridgeport Diocese argued that public release of the records would violate the church’s First Amendment protections against government interference in religion, violate the privacy of plaintiffs and defendants named in them and establish a dangerous precedent regarding the type of court records to which the public should have access.
Its main argument was that the release of the records would severely undermine protections against state interference in church business.
Lawyers for The Times and the other newspapers have argued that the church waived those rights when it turned the records over to the court in the first place.
But in its petition, the diocese said it produced those records only under protest in the 1990s, after being ordered to by the Connecticut judge presiding over the lawsuits. They were surrendered with the promise that they would be sealed from public view.
Publicly releasing them now, the diocese argued, would violate that promise, as well as a First Amendment protection underlined by the Supreme Court in a 1976 ruling, known as the “internal affairs doctrine.”
The ruling prohibited civil authorities from intruding in internal church management, including matters of discipline and internal organization.
Internal church management was, in fact, the issue at the heart of the sexual abuse lawsuits.
The plaintiffs questioned diocesan decision-making in allowing known sexual predators to continue working as priests — in many cases permitting them to abuse again.
Instead of being removed from the priesthood, troubled priests were sent for psychiatric treatment, returned to ministry after receiving clean bills of health, and then usually transferred to parishes where parishioners were given no warning of a priest’s past.
Because the civil suits were settled, juries never answered the question of what responsibility the diocese had for the abuse suffered by children at the hands of priests it transferred.
But church officials maintain that the “internal affairs doctrine” applied then and applies now.
If Catholic values of forgiveness and redemption are among the considerations employed in deciding whether priests accused of sexual abuse work again — even priests known for a certainty to have committed abuse — juries “are not to be allowed, in retrospect, to conclude that the diocese’s weighing of these factors resulted in a misguided or negligent decision,” the diocese argued in its petition.
To do so would constitute government interference in “ecclesiastical policy decisions,” the diocese petition maintained.To release church documents concerning such decisions to the public, it added, would undermine the diocese’s “right to function as a religious institution.” +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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