“This is a tipping point,” Jeff Anderson said. He’s found the documents he hopes to use in a federal lawsuit against the Vatican itself.
The files show that a Vatican office led by the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, halted a church trial against a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 boys.
“I came to the stark realization that the problems were really endemic to the clerical culture, and all the problems we are having in the U.S. led back to Rome.”
Since 1983, Anderson and the five other attorneys at his downtown St. Paul firm have sued thousands of Catholic priests, bishops, and dioceses over allegations of sexual abuse by priests and other church leaders.
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests asserts, “Jeff doesn’t get sole credit, and he wouldn’t claim it, but he was among the very first to see the magnitude of this cover-up and is still among the most dedicated to its undoing.”