Metro Voice News Celebrating Faith, Family & Community
Sixty people have filed lawsuits in St. Louis and surrounding counties alleging they were abused as children by dozens of Catholic priests, nuns and others, the Catholic News Agency and Associated Press report.
One of those accused George Lucas, the current archbishop of Omaha. A St. Louis County Circuit Court lawsuit said the unnamed accuser was 16 when he met Lucas at the now-closed St. Louis Preparatory Seminary in the late 1980s, where Lucas was a priest and dean of education. The lawsuit accuses Lucas of sexually abusing the boy multiple times and offering better grades for sexual favors.
“I categorically deny the accusation made by an anonymous person,” Lucas said. “I have never had sexual contact with another person. I referred the matter to the apostolic nuncio, Pope Francis‘ representative in Washington, D.C., for his guidance.”
The lawsuits allege abuse dating as far back as the 1940 and as recently as 2015. David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said at least 10 of the alleged abusers are still alive, and he expressed concern that they could abuse again. Some of those named previously have been convicted of crimes or named in earlier civil cases.
In one case, a lawsuit alleges that both a priest and a nun sexually abused a girl with an intellectual disability from 1999 through 2002, when she was 8 to 12 years old. The lawsuit said the priest threatened to kill the girl if she resisted. When she went to another school from 2002 through 2004, she was abused by another priest, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuits also name the Archdiocese of St. Louis and its current archbishop, Mitchell T. Rozanski, alleging that St. Louis church leaders have “known of the sexual abuse perpetrated upon its young parishioners and children in the community” without stopping it. “This shameless cover-up spanned decades and allowed various clergy and other employees to access and sexually abuse numerous children,” the lawsuits said.
In 2019, the Archdiocese of St. Louis released the names of 61 clergy facing what it determined to be “substantiated” allegations of sexual abuse of children. The investigation in St. Louis followed the release of a 2018 report in Pennsylvania that cited the abuse of more than 1,000 children by hundreds of priests since the 1940s and the efforts of church leaders to cover it up.
It has previously paid $1 million to settle suits.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
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