A federal judge on Wednesday ended a lawsuit from a woman who alleged that priests of a religious order sexually abused her as a child during retreats in Maine in the 1950s.
The plaintiff, named as Jane Doe in court documents, brought the suit against the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate Eastern Province in 2022 claiming she suffers from severe mental and emotional injuries from the abuse.
Doe was 4 years old in 1955 when she was placed in the custody of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Fall River, Massachusetts, where she remained until she was 8, according to court documents.
During that time, Doe said, the “Grey Nuns” of the orphanage and Oblates priests would bring Doe and other orphans to retreat homes in Augusta, Bucksport and Bar Harbor, under the pretense of singing and dancing for the priests in religious performances. There priests performed sexual acts on the children. Doe claimed the sexual abuse happened on at least 10 separate occasions.
Doe alleged that two reverends, Arthur P. Craig and Francis L. Demers, were involved in the Oblates and “contributed to the alleged instances of sexual abuse that she experienced from the
Oblates priests.”
According to court documents, she repressed the memory until 1994 when an episode of 60 Minutes “triggered the experience to the foreground of her consciousness.” Through a survivors’ group, she met another woman who claimed to have been sexually abused by the Oblates priests. In 2020, that woman asked Doe to testify on her behalf. Doe then sought her own recourse against the people who abused her.
Doe’s lawsuit was made possible by a 2021 change in state law that lifted a statute of limitations on such claims. Previously, people who were abused as children before the late 1980s were barred from suing their abusers and the organizations for which they worked.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Stacey Neumann granted the Oblates’ motion for summary judgment, ending the case in favor of the defendants.
Neumann said the Oblates did not know and could not have known of Revs. Craig or Demers’ “propensity for sexual abuse” at the time, noting that Craig’s personnel file did not include instances of misconduct, and there is no evidence suggesting that Demers, who is deceased, had any such record in his file.
Likewise, Neumann said the retreats, which were not owned by the Oblates, could not have suspected the abuse.
“[U]nlike the foreseeability for misconduct at a fraternity house, the Cour[t] does not find a corresponding general foreseeability regarding the Oblates and minor children,” Neumann wrote.
