Catholic Church can't use First Amendment defense. (Around The States).

Officials with the Roman Catholic Church cannot use the First Amendment's religious freedom guarantees to dismiss cases of sexual abuse filed against priests in Massachusetts, a state court has ruled.

Superior Court Judge Constance Sweeney on Feb. 19 rejected a motion by church attorneys to dismiss more than 400 sex-abuse cases. Church officials had claimed that the First Amendment prohibits civil courts from intervening in internal church affairs.

Sweeney said no interpretation of the First Amendment grants houses of worship "unqualified immunity from secular legal redress, regardless of how negligent [or] reckless" they might have been.

Sweeney did dismiss claims that church officials were negligent for ordaining priests who later turned out to be abusers or for not removing them from their posts. Decisions about who to ordain and who to remove from religious positions are "purely ecclesiastical matters" and none of the state's concern, she wrote.

Roderick MacLeish, an attorney who represents more than half of the 400 victims, told the Associated Press that the ruling proves that the Catholic Church "as a religious institution is not above and beyond the law."

Church officials said they made the argument in court mainly to satisfy demands of insurance companies, which said they would not pay claims stemming from the abuse until the church exhausted all legal defense options.