Years after the eruption of the sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, James O'Bryan's story might seem drearily familiar.He recalls that as a little boy, the church was the center of his life — until he lost his faith after he says a priest molested him.
What makes this case unusual is when O'Bryan says this happened: 1928.
That's earlier than any other case among the hundreds against the Archdiocese of Louisville and the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.
Of those, one stretched back to the late 1930s and a couple to the 1940s.
Recently settled cases in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles reportedly dated back seven decades.
O'Bryan's goes back almost eight.
O'Bryan, 86, a Marine veteran of World War II, isn't suing the Archdiocese of Louisville.
The California man said he did not learn about the wave of litigation against the archdiocese until after it had reached a $25.7 million settlement with 243 people in 2003 — at which point the statute of limitations would have made it difficult to sue.
He is suing a bigger target: the Vatican. He is one of three plaintiffs seeking class-action status in a federal lawsuit filed in Louisville alleging that the Roman Catholic Church orchestrated a worldwide cover-up of sexual abuse from its headquarters.
The lawsuit, filed in 2004, has moved slowly, but a judge has allowed the case to proceed despite the Vatican's claim that it should be immune from the suit because of its status as a foreign nation.
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