Ohio’s Issue 1 targets unborn children all nine months, Cincinnati archbishop says

Cardinal Sean O’Malley briefs reporters during a Vatican abuse summit. / Credit: Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Boston, Mass., Oct 5, 2023 / 12:21 pm (CNA).

The Archdiocese of Boston is opposing a state bill that would eliminate the time limit for filing a civil lawsuit for claims of sexual abuse of children, saying it would put its efforts to assist victims at risk. 

In 2014, the state enacted a bill that extended the statute of limitations to when the plaintiff turns 53 or seven years after the plaintiff “discovered or reasonably should have discovered that an emotional or psychological injury or condition was caused by such act.” 

The current bill being considered by the Legislature would eliminate the time limit and allow lawsuits at any time against a purported perpetrator or against a defendant that “negligently supervised a person who sexually abused a minor” or “caused or contributed to the sexual abuse of a minor by another person.” 

Supporters of the bill say it would help more traumatized victims get justice and healing. 

William Giblin, 55, of Methuen, Massachusetts, told a legislative committee last month he was “sexually, physically, and emotionally” abused by a priest at a seminary where he was sent to do court-ordered community service at age 14 and that he subsequently suffered for years from shame and drug addiction and has had problems with trust and relationships. 

“These institutions need to be held accountable for the damage it’s done to so many children. … So many people overdose or commit suicide because of the secret you keep, and the toll it takes on your body,” Giblin told members of the Massachusetts Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary during a public hearing Sept. 12. “Please eliminate the statute of limitation. You can’t force someone to start talking about this. It’s when you’re ready, period.” 

Another supporter of the bill, Kathryn Robb, executive director of Child USAdvocacy, told the committee that eliminating the statute of limitations would educate the public about the problem and shift financial costs away from victims and taxpayers and “to the bad guys where it belongs.” 

“And finally, and perhaps most importantly, it identifies hidden sexual predators,” Robb said during the hearing. 

Child USA, a nonprofit organization that supports eliminating statutes of limitations for child sex abuse for civil and criminal cases, says that as of earlier this year 17 states, the federal government, and two territories had eliminated time limits for filing civil lawsuits “for some or all” child sex abuse claims. 

But an opponent of the bill said removing time limits retroactively makes it hard for an organization to defend itself from long-ago claims or to make adequate provisions to protect itself going forward. 

Cary Silverman, a lawyer representing the American Tort Reform Association, said statutes of limitations “have a critical function in the civil justice system.” 

“They’re there to allow judges and juries to evaluate liability when the evidence is available, before records are lost and witnesses disappear. Their length doesn’t reflect the severity of the injury or the reprehensibility of the conduct. They’re there based on evidence that will be needed to accurately decide liability in any sort of civil action,” Silverman said during the hearing Sept. 12. 

Silverman said the American Tort Reform Association doesn’t oppose what he called “a lengthy statute of limitations,” but he said there must be limits. 

“In the revived lawsuits that will result from this bill, there may be no doubt that the plaintiff has experienced horrific abuse. The question that will be difficult or impossible to fairly answer is whether decades ago an organization could have detected that abuse or have had additional practices in place that might have prevented or stopped the employee or the volunteer who committed it,” Silverman said. 

“In a revived action alleging that a school failed to prevent abuse in 1965, for example — the type of claim you’re going to see — a 35-year-old employee from that time, who would serve as a witness now, would be 93 years old. And any paper records from that time would be gone.” 

Widespread public awareness of the clergy sex abuse problem in the Catholic Church began in the Archdiocese of Boston, where in January 2002 The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team uncovered scores of priest-abusers and victims. (As of 2021, the Globe reported, the archdiocese had identified 132 priest-abusers; as of 2017, the archdiocese had met with more than 1,000 victims.) 

A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston contacted Wednesday by CNA said the state’s current statute of limitations works well but that eliminating it might cause more harm than good. 

“For the last 20 years, the Archdiocese of Boston (which represents two-thirds of the Catholics in Massachusetts) has been caring both financially and pastorally for all victims who come forward. We do not turn people away and have not shut the door, rather focusing on healing and taking responsibility for the harm they have experienced,” said Terrence Donilon, spokesman for the archdiocese, in an email message, with emphasis in the original. 

“We worked with the Legislature in 2014 to amend the law which allows us to continue the work with victims and their families in this manner. After nine years, the law has proven to be beneficial to the victims,” Donilon said. “The legislative changes currently proposed and under consideration would jeopardize our ability to continue to work with victims and their families in a manner that they deserve.” 

The statute of limitations bill’s primary sponsor is state Sen. Joan Lovely, D-Salem, who has also filed a bill that would eliminate the time limit for filing criminal charges in Massachusetts in cases of sexual assault or rape of a person under 18. 

The Joint Committee on the Judiciary has not taken action on the bills yet. 

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Credit: chodyra Mike 1/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Aug 6, 2024 / 13:09 pm (CNA).
The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Monday denied a stay of a recent ruling that required that the Statewide Charter School Board rescind a contract with a Catholic charter … […]

South Bend, Ind., Nov 17, 2019 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- For Aristotle, the definition of perfect friendship was so narrow that precious few could achieve it.

In order to have a perfect friendship between two people, Aristotle said that both must be models of goodness and virtue, willing the good of the other and loving each other for their own sake.

He also thought these levels of virtue and goodness could only be achieved by a narrow slice of the population: namely, the Greek male elite. Women, non-Greeks, productive workers, and slaves were, in Aristotle’s mind, unable to achieve the levels of virtue and goodness necessary for such friendships.

Such people could have other kinds of friendships, Aristotle said – friendships of utility or pleasure – but they could never have perfect friendship.

It was this view of friendship with which moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre took issue in his Nov. 8 address at the di Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture’s 20th annual conference, which this year had the theme of friendship.

“For (perfect) friendships, so Aristotle tells us, we have to be good in ways and to a degree that…if we’re honest, many of us know that we’re not,” MacIntyre said.

“Aristotle allows that…we can, without being good, participate in friendships of mutual utility or of shared pleasure, but even this should be depressing for many of us,” he added, “for what we need on the most important occasions when we need friendship…are friendships sustained by a good deal more than the possibility of mutual utility or of shared pleasure.”

MacIntyre pointed to other still unsatisfactory definitions of friendship, such as that from Dale Carnegie, who wrote the 1936 book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

But what Carnegie suggests will not help one have real friends, MacIntyre said, but will manufacture “a certain kind of superficial sociability, a sociability which no one of integrity could confuse with friendship.” Such friendships, he added, might be compared to someone who is a Facebook friend and nothing more.

Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, concludes that “yes there are friends, but it’s error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you, and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend.”

With these different definitions and ideas of friendship, what then does it mean to truly be a friend? While hoping to broaden the scope of friendship beyond that which is available to the Greek male elite, MacIntyre said there are still many types of relationships that, while friendly, are not true friendships.

Such relationships include, for example, those between coworkers, where a certain amount of friendliness is helpful in achieving common goals and completing tasks together, or relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between members of groups such as rock climbers, people in a choir, or members of a surgical team, MacIntyre said.

Those in such relationships “only care for each other because they are collaborators in some particular role. They do not care for each other as she or he is in themselves, apart from whatever role they happen to be playing at any particular time. This alone is sufficient to distinguish such relationships from friendships,” he added.

With such relationships being so prolific in our lives, MacIntyre said some may be tempted to wonder what the use is of another kind of friendship after all.

In his response to this question, MacIntyre said that because human beings are dependent rational animals who need to be able to make good judgements about themselves and the world in order to flourish, a key element of true friendship then is the ability to tell one another the truth.

“Insofar as our minds are not so informed, we’re liable to go astray in a variety of ways, to be victims of ignorance, arrogance, deception and self-deception. We become unable to flourish and we become unable to recognize that we are unable to flourish. We make bad decisions, for we can hope to avoid bad decision making only by deliberating in the company of a certain kind of other,” he said.

This other – a true friend – must not only be a “perceptive inquirer” and “scrupulously truthful,” they must “care enough about us and about our flourishing as human agents to insist on us, too, being truthful, so with their help, we may become able to correct our mistakes and to free ourselves from our illusions.”

True friendships must also be uncalculating of the costs and benefits of the relationship, and must be relationships in which “each friend genuinely cares both for the other and for the good of the other and finds in this caring a sufficient reason for acting as she or he does,” MacIntyre added.

St. Thomas Aquinas, MacIntyre noted, was also able to “correct” some of Aristotle’s deficiencies in his definition of friendship by recognizing that people possess various virtues in varying degrees, and that grace and charity can account for some of the ways baptized persons act that go beyond either their natural inclinations towards virtue or their moral education in the virtues, which allows for a broader understanding of friendship.

“So a more recognizable portrait of humanity emerges – and one sometimes wonders how many people Aristotle had actually met,” MacIntyre said.

This more recognizable view of humanity is “one in which moral education has become the work of a lifetime, and moral failure in this or that respect is a recurrent and characteristic feature of our lives. It matters, of course, that Aquinas writes as a Christian theologian and therefore is someone for whom their sinfulness is one of the key facts about human beings,” he added.

This more flexible view of humanity also allows that good friendships can be schools of virtue, rather than just something that occurs between two people who have already achieved perfect virtue, because these friendships are “a means to self-knowledge. Friendships survive and flourish…only if each friend can rely on the other’s truthfulness. And without the self-knowledge that is one result of such truthfulness we’re all of us apt to become victims of our own self-indulgent fantasies,” he said.

An additional key element of a true friendship is that it is a gift, MacIntyre said. A gift is freely given, and must be received. This means that one must be open to the possibility of friendship with others, and recognize the opportunity of friendship when it occurs.

This requires a responsiveness to others, as well as a willingness to be surprised or disappointed along the way, he noted. It means letting go of pride, or of greed or an unnecessary competitiveness with others, he added.

“Yet what above all else stands in the way of openness to friendship is insincerity,” MacIntyre said. An insincere person is an actor of sorts, he noted. An insincere person is not necessarily a liar, but they have convinced others and sometimes themselves that they are something or someone that they are not.

“An insincere person invites others to respond not to their reality, but the sometimes impressive fiction that they have constructed. So the other is put at a disadvantage and when the invitation extended to the other is or includes an offer a friendship, what is offered cannot, in fact, be friendship. For one is being invited to care for a fiction, not for a real human being,” he said.

A final characteristic of a true friend is that they care not only for their friend, but for all that their friend cares about, MacIntyre said, quoting Aquinas: “When the man has friendship for someone for his sake, he loves all belonging to it, whether children, servants or related to him in any way.”

“Indeed, so much do we love our friends, but for their sake we love all who belonged to them,” MacIntyre said.

And so with these defining characteristics of a good friendship, they still may be difficult to find in today’s world, MacIntyre said, but they are possible and necessary for human flourishing.

“Each of us needs such others if we are able to deliberate well and to make good choices. Each of us needs such others if we are to achieve the self-knowledge without which we can’t flourish.”

[…]