More On RICO And The Church

Doing more research on what may be up with a federal investigation into child abuse (or other potential crimes) in the Church, I find so far that Church Militant has done the most coverage, and it seems fairly level-headed. It's worth pointing out that most crimes, including sex crimes, are handled at the state and local level. A federal crime normally involves a specific violation of a federal statute. But there are otheer gotchas.

This report from August 29 is worth revisiting:

Church Militant was able to independently confirm that the Department of Justice is taking great interest in the possibility of a nationwide investigation into allegations of Catholic clerical sex abuse.

In the aftermath of the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, there was talk about the possibility of prosecuting the Catholic Church under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

RICO is a federal law created in 1970 to combat organized crime. It enables prosecutors to go after a criminal organization in and of itself, rather than targeting the specific crimes of individuals connected to it.

Some say the Church leaders who covered up abusive priests were acting like Mafia bosses, but others pointed out that it would be hard to prosecute the Catholic hierarchy under RICO because of specific details in how the law is written. For instance, sex abuse is not listed among the offenses that an organization must be connected with to be prosecuted under RICO.

This report from the Cumberland, MD Herald-Mail goes somewhat further into the issues and options for litigation:

And now, as we have learned more about the Catholic church’s conspiracy of silence and cover-up regarding sex crimes against children dating back decades, there is the appearance that RICO could come into play.

Some wonder if it could be used to go after the church hierarchy, holding it criminally responsible for the sins of the hundreds of priests who preyed on children, as outlined in the Pennsylvania grand jury report that found widespread abuse in a half-dozen of the state’s dioceses.

Well, about that.

While civil suits filed against the church have resulted in billions of dollars in settlements for victims of abuse, there have been no attempts to hold the church criminally responsible for its actions.

“The lawyers who have been involved in these cases have always thought that the church operated like a criminal enterprise,” said Steve Rubino, a New Jersey lawyer who sued the Archdiocese of Camden under the civil provisions of the RICO law in 1993, the first time the law had been applied to cases involving the church.

. . . RICO, at least the criminal version, lists specific crimes that can be cited as “predicate offenses,” mostly crimes that serve to enrich the organization, the kinds of crimes that are the business of criminal organizations. Child abuse is not among them.

. . . Civil RICO cases have been filed against the Catholic church with mixed success. The 1993 case filed by Rubino was quickly settled for an undisclosed amount.

It doesn't sound like the threat of civil RICO litigation alone would be enough to remove the entrenched network of corrupt US bishops and cardinals, although a continued attrition of Church resources from a new stream of penalties or settlements would pose a problem. There would naturally be low-level embarrassments, but the media, at least under the current obsolescent paradigm, has been sympathetic to overt liberals like Mahony.

In the YouTube I linked in yesterday's post, Michael Voris suggests there may be a different theory developing in the Justice Department, involving prosecution of bishops for coordinating transfers of violators across state lines, or sending/bringing violators across national boundaries.

This could potentially be more powerful, since under a civil-litigation-only remedy, bishops or cardinals may be embarrassed and lose their titles very late in their careers, but they continue to live well and certainly don't go to prison. That the Vatican would need to assert sovereign immunity to keep Cardinal Ladaria from testifying in France suggests this may not last forever.