Catholic Church an obstacle to justice

Mark Rozzi says he was 13, a young altar boy, when a priest at his eastern Pennsylvania parish sexually assaulted him in a shower.

It took Rozzi, who says the priest spent a year grooming him with trips to McDonald's and secretly shared beers, a quarter century to talk about the experience publicly. By then it was too late for any legal action.

Now a 44-year-old Pennsylvania state representative, Rozzi is a driving force behind one of about a dozen bills making their way through legislatures in states including New York and New Jersey that aim to give child sex assault victims more time to sue their attackers.

When Pope Francis makes his first visit to the United States this month, he will find that wounds from the U.S. Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal are still festering - and draining its finances - more than a decade after it burst onto the national stage.

The tensions are being played out in courtrooms and state legislatures, where the Church is using its legal and political clout to oppose bills that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of child sex abuse. A statute of limitations forbids prosecutors or plaintiffs from taking legal action after a certain number of years.

The pontiff has vowed to root out "the scourge" of sex abuse from the Roman Catholic Church, and this year created a Vatican tribunal to judge clergy accused of such crimes.

But U.S. victims' advocates contend the biggest obstacle they face in giving victims more time to report abuse remains the Church itself, and want the pope to change that stance.

The U.S. church has already been dealt a heavy financial blow by settlement payments and other costs totalling around $3 billion, which has forced it to sell off assets and cut costs.

"It is the bishops who have blocked any kind of meaningful reform," said Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who studies statutes of limitations.

"The bishops and the pope have a lot of explaining to do as to why it would be in their mission to keep all of these victims from seeking justice."

Reports that Catholic priests had sexually assaulted children, and that bishops had worked to cover up the rapes, first became big news in 2002.

As many as 100,000 U.S. children may have been the victims of clerical sex abuse, insurance experts said in a paper presented at a Vatican conference in 2012. Some 4,300 members of the Catholic clergy were accused of sexual assault, of which at least 300 have been convicted, according to Bishop Accountability, a private group that has tracked the scandal.