In recent child abuse cases in the US and Ireland was the church being sued over the actions of the clergy involved or the priests themselves? It just occured to me that i didn’t exactly pick this up. Is the RC church defending the individual priests or itself as an organisation?
BTW I’m asking out of curiosity about the law, i’m not wishing to start any debates.
While the individual priest can be named as a codefendant, most often it is the Church which is sued or, actually, some subset thereof, such as the local diocese or the order to which the priest belongs. This is done on the theory that an employer is liable for abuses committed by its agents during the performance of duties (this is known as respondeat superior) and, further, that the Church was negligent in not taking action to prevent such abuses, especially in instances where allegations about a particular priest were already known to his superiors. A practical consideration driving this choice of defendant is that the individual priest generally doesn’t have all that much money one can collect.
The legal corporate entity of the Catholic Church in the U.S. is the diocese. (No parish owns its own buildings, for example, they are all under the direct fiduciary and administrative oversight of the ordinary (head bishop) of the diocese.)
The median income of priests in the U.S. is currently less than $17,000 per year.
If one wants to be recompensed for an injury, there is only one place to go for it. (This would be true of those diocese that have attempted to handle molestation cases correctly, as well as places such as Boston where priests were moved in complete anonymity. A diocese where any priest accused of molesting a child was immediately turned over to the prosecutor’s office would bear the same burden as Boston, as they are the only legal entity involved that has funds of any sort.)