In Hearing Tomorrow, Diocese of New Ulm Seeks to Dismiss Sexual Abuse Lawsuit from Court

Tomorrow at 3:00 PM [There hearing should have taken place 9/22/2015] in Brown County District Court, the Diocese of New Ulm will ask the Court to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of a sexual abuse survivor, Doe 7, who was sexually abused as a young girl by Fr. David Roney at St. Mary’s Church in Willmar, MN.

The diocese continues to fight sexual abuse survivors and their advocates by keeping secret the full list of credibly accused clerics and the documents pertaining to the clerics and child sexual abuse by clergy. Until this information is released to the public, children remain at risk.

In March 2015, the Diocese of New Ulm quietly released the names of four clerics with allegations of sexual abuse of minors. These clerics included Fr. David Roney, Fr. John Murphy, Fr. Michael Skoblik, and Fr. Dennis Becker whose names was publicly released for the first time.

 For more information surrounding Roney:

“I just felt so dirty all of those years,” Lori Stoltz said as she and Kim Schmit went public with allegations that the Rev. David Roney sexually abused them in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he was a priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Willmar.

“It was the church that was hiding him,” said Jan Hazen, Schmit’s mother.

“It is a seed that grows and grows...” Schmit said of the problems abuse causes. “Somebody shouldn’t have to go through that.”

Schmit and Stoltz are two of about a half-dozen women who have filed lawsuits against the Catholic Diocese of New Ulm claiming that the Rev. David Roney sexually abused them when he was a priest in southern and western Minnesota.

And this from the BishopAccountability.org citing a 2007 article by Jonathan Kaminsky of City Pages "Unforgiven:  The Diocese of New Ulm Knew Father David Roney Was a Pedophile When It Sent Him to Live Among Orphan Schoolchildren in Guatemala": 

The mountain of documents constituting Roney's personnel file paints a deeply disturbing picture of a pedophile priest whose taste for young children went unchecked and unpunished for decades. And it doesn't end in Minnesota. According to a sworn affidavit secured by the women's lawyer, Roney spent his retirement years at the diocese's mission in Guatemala, where he took up with a prepubescent orphan girl whom he planned to adopt.

"Their attitude was, 'It's okay for him to abuse kids in Guatemala, because they probably won't say anything,'" Kathleen Stafford, an attorney representing the women in the suit, says of the church leadership. "The whole thing makes me sick."  <--More to come on that issue - a “pipeline” of rape and abuse cases between the U.S and Latin America by The Catholic Church
,,,
 Lucker quietly shipped Roney off to Foundation House, a remote facility alongside a dusty two-lane road in the high desert of New Mexico. For nearly 20 years, between 1976 and 1995, Foundation House was the place where the Catholic Church sent its wayward clergymen. All told, some 500 priests and monks underwent the "program," which mingled psychotherapy, medication, and various tests that purported to both diagnose and treat sexually troubled men of the cloth. Among the tools reportedly in use was a plethysmograph, a contraption that hooks on to the penis and gauges its responses to various erotic images and sounds in order to diagnose sexual preferences.

Roney spent a week at the center. While there, he completed a "personal history" form. It paints a picture of a man who, despite his chosen vocation, never felt spiritually satisfied. "I really want to feel a closeness to God and I have not so far experienced it," he wrote. "I enjoy presiding at baptisms and, strangely, funerals. I would be happy if I never had to preside at a wedding again. I feel old."

In Hearing Tomorrow, Diocese of New Ulm Seeks to Dismiss Sexual Abuse Lawsuit from Court