Readers of this forum might be interested to hear the recent McDuff ruling in a High Court Case involving the Catholic Church (see [
www.thelawyer.com]) or related news articles such as the BBC report ( at [
www.bbc.co.uk]). As it says in the BBC article,
Quote
Jon Brown, from the children's charity, said: All organisations that work with children have a clear responsibility to ensure their safety. Religious organisations are no different.
"This is a ruling in favour of children and rightly places the responsibility on the Church to ensure that they select and monitor priests carefully and have robust procedures in place to take steps to protect children when there are concerns."
The Church had claimed it could not be held vicariously responsible because there was no formal employment relationship with its priests.
But Mr Justice Macduff decided the professional relationship between a priest and his bishop was sufficiently close so as to impose responsibility.
Don't know about you, but I find that interesting in the context of Struthers. "... responsibility to selcts and monitor carefully" "robust procedures in place to take steps where there are concerns" - I wonder how Struthers scores on these criteria!