HARRISBURG – The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has ruled that sexual abuse claims brought by an Altoona woman against her local Catholic Church diocese will remain time-barred, despite the issuance of a grand jury report in 2016 which confirmed a series of other abuse allegations levied against her assailant.
In Rice v. Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, the Blair County Court of Common Pleas initially granted the Catholic Church judgment on the pleadings, finding that plaintiff Renee Rice’s claims were barred by the applicable two-year statute of limitations – since the last instance of alleged abuse occurred in 1981, when Rice was only 14 years old.
A March 2016 grand jury report illustrated efforts on the part of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown to cover up abuse allegations brought against Rev. Charles F. Bodziak, of St. Leo’s Parish in Altoona – Rice’s alleged assailant.
Bodziak was removed from service by Bishop Mark Bartchak that January, two months before the state Attorney General’s Office issued the grand jury report, in which Bodziak was named as a predator priest.
Rice filed suit against the Diocese in the Blair County Court of Common Pleas soon after the report’s release.
However, with a two-year statute of limitations beginning to toll upon her 18th birthday, the Blair County trial court said the statute of limitations for her claims expired in 1987 and was therefore compelled to dismiss the lawsuit.
But on appeal, a three-judge panel of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania disagreed with the ruling of the Blair County trial judge and reversed the decision in June 2019.
“Rice does not allege that the conspiracy’s only harm was the molestation she suffered in the 1970s and 1980s. She claims to have suffered a host of new injuries upon learning of the Diocesan defendant’s intentional, tortious conduct from the [2016] Grand Jury Report,” Superior Court Judge Deborah A. Kunselman said.
“These alleged facts and resultant harms, if proven at trial, indicate the statute of limitations for her count of civil conspiracy did not begin to run until January 2016, at the earliest. If Ms. Rice proves all of this to a jury, she filed her lawsuit well within the two-year statute of limitations for civil conspiracy on June 21, 2016.”
The Diocese then appealed the Superior Court’s ruling to the state Supreme Court.
After arguments took place in October, a majority contingent of the state Supreme Court handed down its 5-2 ruling on Wednesday, in which that body reversed the earlier decision of the Superior Court and reinstated the trial court’s dismissal.
Pa. Supreme Court Rules In Favor of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown
In writing for the Court’s Majority, Justice Christine Donohue stated that the statute of limitations had long since expired in this matter.
“We need not resolve the issue as it is clear the statute of limitations expired decades ago. We conclude, as the Superior Court properly did 15 years ago [in a separate case] under the same circumstances, that the inquiry notice approach to the discovery rule required Rice to investigate the Diocese as a potential additional cause of her injuries during the limitations period,” Donohue said.
“Whether courthouse doors should be opened for suits based on underlying conduct that occurred long ago is an exercise in line drawing that includes difficult policy determinations. The judiciary is ill-equipped to make that call.”
Chief Justice Max Baer and Justices Thomas G. Saylor, Kevin M. Dougherty and Sallie Updyke Mundy joined Donohue’s opinion, with Baer filing a concurring one of his own.
“The majority concludes that the inquiry notice approach to the discovery rule required Renee’ Rice ‘to investigate the Diocese as a potential additional cause of her injuries during the limitations period,” Baer said in his separate opinion.
“The majority reaches this conclusion because Rice was aware at the time of each alleged assault that Reverend Charles F. Bodziak caused her injury, and her complaint does not allege that she made any inquiries of the Diocese relating to whether it was aware of Bodziak’s alleged criminal conduct or monitored such conduct when placing priests in parishes in the Diocese. Indeed…Rice concedes that she did not make inquiries with the Diocese regarding the matter until the grand jury report was published in 2016, decades after the alleged assaults.”
Justice David N. Wecht filed a dissenting opinion, in which he was joined by Justice Debra Todd.
“The Majority’s conclusion that Rice failed to exercise reasonable diligence in investigating the Diocese’s role in her attack is based on nothing more than the fact that Rice knew that she was assaulted on church property by a priest employed by the Diocese. This analysis dramatically oversimplifies the reasonable diligence inquiry,” Wecht said.
“There can be no policy justification for today’s decision either. Submitting to a jury the question of reasonable diligence would not prevent the Diocese from arguing, as it does successfully before this Court today, that any reasonable person in Rice’s position would have discovered that the Diocese was actively concealing sexual abuse from the mid-1970s until the release of the grand jury report in 2016. But the Majority, insisting that it knows for certain how every reasonable juror would come down on the issue, relieves the Diocese’s lawyers of that unenviable task. Suffice it to say I am unpersuaded by the Majority’s crystal-ball gazing.”
Legal Roads to Recovery Closing for Pa. Sex Abuse Survivors
The Rice ruling serves as a second stun punch to Catholic Church sex abuse survivors in Pennsylvania this year; survivors who have already seen the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf botch the progress of a state constitutional amendment which would have retroactively extended the timeline for victims to file civil actions against their abusers.
The Department of State failed to properly advertise the amendment, in accordance with Pennsylvania law. Due to the department’s procedural snafu, the process had to begin all over again and the measure won’t be able to be considered as a ballot question until 2023, at the very earliest.
The debacle led to the resignation of former Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, and Wolf to call for a full investigation conducted by the Office of the State Inspector General.
That investigation’s report, released in May, credited “internal systemic failures” as the reason for the failure to advertise the constitutional amendment.
Subsequent to the report’s release, current Secretary of the Commonwealth Veronica Degraffenreid offered a public apology from the department and explained that new initiatives had been enacted to prevent such a procedural error from ever happening again.
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania case 3 WAP 2020
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com