Twenty laypeople file suit against Archbishop Vigneron

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Bad idea to open this kind of link from an unknown person on a website.
 
It’s a publicly available document of the State of Michigan
 
Then a link to the website would be a better plan, so people can see the source.
 
StudentMI said:
Here’s a link to the article it came from.

Yes I know, it’s Church Militant. Just helping the OP out. Not making a judgement on the case.
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Every time I read an article from Church Militant I regret it. This one is no different. Nothing but libelous accusations and hyperbole. Ugh! 😒
 
There doesn’t seem to be any dispute on the facts of what happened (Just a lot of opinion from the plaintiffs that Bugarin fabricated this and that), and there’s a high bar for emotional distress cases. The fact that their favorite priest got removed from a parish and they think it was unjust probably doesn’t meet the bar. The fact that their donations were used to remove their priest as part of a diocese-wide attempt to clean up sexual abuse cases probably doesn’t meet any bar for fraud either, especially since donations were voluntary and they didn’t have to give anything, and their donations went into a pool of money that was likely used for a variety of causes.

Emotional distress cases are usually for victims of crimes, or family members of victims of crimes, or people who witnessed some horrible event and have been unable to function ever since, etc.

The justice system also recognizes that it’s not very proper to on the one hand expect the Church to deal with its sexual abuse scandal and then on the other hand expect the Church to be liable to parishioners who’ve decided their favorite priest must certainly be innocent of something that happened years in the past, based on their own personal investigation and the fact that he is such a holy guy.
 
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Victims of sexual abuse may be unreliable witnesses because of trauma they have been through. It doesn’t necessarily mean that their allegations of abuse are not credible.

The AOD still has the right to remove a priest from ministry. They don’t have to answer to the parishioners for what they do. The AOD is not the civil justice system where there are processes to appeal and have a new trial. If the bishop wants to remove a priest, he removes him. The end.
If the priest wants to contest this then he goes through whatever channels are available to him personally.
Parishioners don’t get a say, just like they don’t get a say in what priest they are sent in the first place.
 
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It’s so interesting that CM prides itself on exposing abusers, and criticizes bishops for their failure to act swiftly. Until it’s Voris’s pastor who’s accused —then suddenly the removal of an accused priest is ‘wicked.’
 
Ok but that’s not the same as saying “the facts are not in dispute”.

The facts are very much in dispute, and the victim himself denies anything happened, or so the plaintiffs allege.
 
I also understand there were way more allegations over this priest’s behavior than just one incident 40 years ago. He’s suing someone who accused him of drinking with underage minors. He also cofounded some nonprofit that specialized in trying to defend or protect accused priests in some way; at least one of the priests they worked with got convicted and the whole charity ended up in a lawsuit as being somehow fraudulent. I’m not surprised the archdiocese removed him as he was doing a lot of edgy stuff beyond just being a parish’s traditional priest.
 
Maximian said:
Ok but that’s not the same as saying “the facts are not in dispute”.

The facts are very much in dispute, and the victim himself denies anything happened, or so the plaintiffs allege.
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The legal finding that “the facts are not in dispute” has nothing to do with what you’re saying. The facts for this case are that a witness in another case changed his story from time to time. There is not a genuine dispute about the fact that the witness changed his story. That is the “fact” for this action.

The facts here are that:
  1. Witness who was allegedly abused changed his story several times
  2. Through some convoluted sequence of events, priest ended up not getting prosecuted by the state but did get removed by the AOD due to AOD deciding abuse allegation was credible (which they have a right to do, they aren’t bound by what the state does)
  3. Parishioners’ donations to some fund were likely used in part to remove their priest
  4. Parishioners got upset and sued.
That’s all we care about. Everything else is not relevant and is mostly just a smoke screen from these plaintiffs trying to look like they and their priest are being persecuted. It’s not working.

In order to make this work then the parishioners would have to show that the archdiocese did something they had no right to do, or something really egregious, and caused the parishioners to have trouble functioning in their daily life and probably go seek medical and psychiatric help.
Again - not happening.
 
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