Here's a case to watch. A federal appeals court in Cincinnati has allowed a lawsuit over alleged clerical sex abuse to proceed against the Vatican. All similar past suits have been dismissed because of the Holy See's sovereign immunity.
"If someone can crack that barrier of immunity, it opens the door to other claims against the Catholic church," Jonathan Levy, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represents concentration-camp survivors in a suit against numerous parties including the Vatican bank, told the Wall Street Journal.
But the Vatican's lawyer in the matter, Jeffrey S. Lena, said the ruling "is a small step and one that is far from establishing whether Vatican policy contributed to thousands of incidents of abuse that have been alleged over several decades," the Journal reports.
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