Clerical Sexual Abuses and Church’s Civil Responsibility: A Comparative Analysis of American and Italian Case Law

Last February, senior Roman Catholic bishops from all over the world gathered in Rome for a summit that Pope Francis had called to focus on the issue of clerical sexual abuse. He described the crisis as “the greatest desolation that the church is undergoing.”1 Cases of clerical sexual abuses, many of them involving children, have in fact, become a dominant topic during recent years, generating a deep process of reflection on the juridical idea of responsibility in different environments. In both the United States and Italian legal systems, courts have taken into consideration “the circumstances . . . under which a religious organization might be held civilly liable” for the “tortious” wrong of clerical offenders, the canonical relationship between priests and the hierarchy, and the clash between church independence and state sovereignty.2 In the United States, the responses of the civil courts are separationist and range from deferential to intrusive approaches.3 In Italy, the courts rely on the principles of church-state cooperation and secularism to promote positive religious freedom. In both legal systems, however, regardless of the established models of church-state relationships—separationist or cooperative—and of the churches’ organizational structures as civil incorporations or civilly recognized ecclesiastical entities, religious institutions are now increasingly considered to be the most credible source of reparation for sexual misconduct, especially when the offense happened many years in the past.4