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 It took Rozzi, who says the priest spent a year grooming him with
trips to McDonald's and secretly shared beers, a quarter century to
talk about the experience publicly. By then it was too late for any
legal action.
Now a 44-year-old Pennsylvania state representative, Rozzi is a
driving force behind one of about a dozen bills making their way
through legislatures in states including New York and New Jersey
that aim to give child sex assault victims more time to sue their
attackers.
When Pope Francis makes his first visit to the United States this
month, he will find that wounds from the U.S. Catholic Church's sex
abuse scandal are still festering - and draining its finances - more
than a decade after it burst onto the national stage.
The tensions are being played out in courtrooms and state
legislatures, where the Church is using its legal and political
clout to oppose bills that would extend the statute of limitations
for victims of child sex abuse. A statute of limitations forbids
prosecutors or plaintiffs from taking legal action after a certain
number of years.
The pontiff has vowed to root out "the scourge" of sex abuse from
the Roman Catholic Church, and this year created a Vatican tribunal
to judge clergy accused of such crimes.
But U.S. victims' advocates contend the biggest obstacle they face
in giving victims more time to report abuse remains the Church
itself, and want the pope to change that stance.
The U.S. church has already been dealt a heavy financial blow by
settlement payments and other costs totaling around $3 billion,
which has forced it to sell off assets and cut costs.
"It is the bishops who have blocked any kind of meaningful reform,"
said Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New
York who studies statutes of limitations.
"The bishops and the pope have a lot of explaining to do as to why
it would be in their mission to keep all of these victims from
seeking justice."
Reports that Catholic priests had sexually assaulted children, and
that bishops had worked to cover up the rapes, first became big news
in 2002.
As many as 100,000 U.S. children may have been the victims of
clerical sex abuse, insurance experts said in a paper presented at a
Vatican conference in 2012. Some 4,300 members of the Catholic
clergy were accused of sexual assault, of which at least 300 have
been convicted, according to Bishop Accountability, a private group
that has tracked the scandal.
U.S. statutes of limitations for criminal and civil cases vary
widely from state to state, making for a patchwork system
determining victims' rights to seek redress in the courts.
Six U.S. states, including Connecticut and Delaware, have extended
their statutes of limitation for child sex abuse.
A victim of child sex abuse in Delaware, for example, no longer
faces any deadline to launch a civil suit against an alleged abuser,
and one in Connecticut has until age 48, with no limit if the person
is convicted of first-degree sexual assault. Pennsylvania law gives
a victim only until age 30 to take legal action.
 Bishops' lobbying groups are fighting efforts to extend the statue
of limitations in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Iowa.
New York bishops since 2006 have been fighting a bill that would
eliminate both civil and criminal statute of limitations for past
cases of child sex abuse, though they say they support an alternate
proposal that would only apply to future abuse.
The Church contends that allowing victims to sue over abuse decades
ago would open the way for cases based on flimsy evidence as well as
take a further heavy toll on its finances.
Its opposition is most effective in northeastern states with large
Catholic populations such as New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Such states have sizeable delegations of Catholic lawmakers who are
responsive to the Church's view that extending statues would hurt
its social mission, from closures of parishes to cutbacks of
church-run schools and other programs.
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"MEMORIES FADE"
Hefty settlement costs have forced dioceses to close parishes and
sell off properties. The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis in
Minnesota in January became the 12th U.S. diocese to file for
bankruptcy.
"Statutes of limitations exist to ensure a just verdict can be
reached," said Amy Hill, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Catholic
Conference, the bishops' political arm in the state.
"Over time witnesses' memories fade, evidence is lost or never
found, and in many instances perpetrators or witnesses may be
deceased."
Victims' advocates are focused on reforming statutes of limitations
for civil lawsuits, rather than for criminal cases.
Attempts to reform criminal statutes of limitations to apply to past
crimes would likely run afoul of the U.S. Constitution, they say.
Civil suits are often the only legal avenue they have to seek
redress and that naming alleged abusers in court can help stop them
targeting other victims, victims' advocates say.
Rozzi ran for office promising to change the law in 2012 after
learning that three childhood friends who had also been sexually
abused by priests had committed suicide.
The priest in question was charged in 2002 with sexually assaulting
a 15-year-old boy in Texas and died while awaiting trial, according
to media reports.
"When I was 13 years old and I was standing in the shower getting
raped with my best friend outside the door, do you think I knew what
a statute of limitations was?" Rozzi said.
His bill would give child victims of sex assault in Pennsylvania
until the age of 50 to file civil suits.
Vatican officials say the abuse issue will not be a major focus of
the pope's U.S. visit but that he will address it, either at his
meeting with U.S. bishops in Washington on Sept. 23 or at vespers
with priests and nuns the next day, or both.
At the start of his papacy, Francis was accused of moving too slowly
on sexual abuse. He later set up a commission to advise him on how
to root out the problem, reach out to victims and to advise dioceses
on how to employ best practices.
Victims' advocates said they view extending or abolishing statutes
of limitations as the best way to force Church leaders to take
further action. They want Francis, who has pulled the Church in a
more liberal direction on social issues, to take a more forceful
stance by firing bishops found to have protected pedophile priests.
"The pope has virtually limitless powers," said David Clohessy,
executive director of the Survivors Network of Abuse by Priests, who
was sexually abused by a priest as a child.
"He could sack, and should sack, literally dozens of bishops
tomorrow and if he does that, that's what will make a difference.
That's the missing piece."
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Additional reporting by Philip Pullella
in Vatican City; editing by Stuart Grudgings)
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