Lawyers for three men who claim to have been sexually abused by priests in the Archdiocese of Washington decades ago are criticizing the Catholic enclave’s attempts to dismiss their lawsuit under Maryland’s Child Victims Act of 2023.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys dispute the archdiocese’s claim that a 2017 law granted it immunity from lawsuits brought by child sex abuse victims more than 20 years after they turn 18. The archdiocese last month asked a court to throw out the class-action lawsuit, saying the Child Victims Act’s extension of the statute of limits for abuse litigation is unconstitutional.
But the plaintiffs’ attorneys contend that the Maryland General Assembly “acted well within its power to remedy a societal ill of enormous proportions. The legislature established, as the public policy of Maryland, that sexual predators, their accomplices, and their facilitators must be called to account in civil court for their actions.”
The alleged abuse survivors resided in Maryland counties that are part of the Archdiocese of Washington. The victims, who were between 9 and 12 years old at the time of the alleged attacks, said various members of the clergy assaulted them.
The archdiocese’s headquarters are in Hyattsville, and its jurisdiction includes the District of Columbia and the Maryland counties of Prince George’s, Montgomery, Charles, Calvert and St. Mary’s.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys initiated the lawsuit on Oct. 1, the day the Child Victims Act took effect. The law removed time limits for filing claims for child sex abuse.
The archdiocese filed a motion last month to dismiss the suit, calling the 2017 law a “statute of repose” that provides it special rights that cannot be retroactively overturned by lawmakers. It said the 2017 law provided “an air-tight guarantee that non-perpetrator defendants would never face [the] revival of expired claims.”
The plaintiffs’ attorneys say the archdiocese’s argument “rests on a game of semantics, hoping by alchemy to change what plainly is a statute of limitations by its operation and effect into a statute of repose, then bootstrapping wholesale immunity to it.”
In a statement, the archdiocese said it remains concerned for victims, despite its challenge to the class-action lawsuit.
“The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is asserting its legal defenses in the cases filed against it,” it said. “We remain committed, however, to our longstanding efforts to bring healing to survivors through pastoral care and other forms of assistance that are available apart from the legal process.”
The archdiocese said it remains “committed to maintaining our robust safe environment policies that have been in place for decades to ensure the protection of all those who are entrusted to our care.”
The Maryland law has generated controversy since its passage this year. Anticipating a raft of new lawsuits, the Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 29, just before the measure took effect.
At the same time, Cardinal Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Washington, said in an open letter: “What I can and must do is express again how profoundly sorry I am for past acts of abuse that occurred within our cherished Church.”
A total of 34 clergy associated with the archdiocese were listed as being “credibly accused” of sexual abuse and removed from ministry, including former archbishop Theodore E. McCarrick. Once a cardinal and an influential member of the church’s hierarchy, he was defrocked by Pope Francis in February 2019.