Justices Won’t Save Catholic Church From Old Sex Abuse Claims

The Catholic Church in California will have to face decades-old abuse claims after the US Supreme Court refused on Tuesday to take up its case.

The church will now be “forced to litigate hundreds or thousands of cases seeking potentially billions of dollars in retroactive punitive damages,” it told the justices.

The Roman Catholic Bishops of Oakland and other California cities urged the justices to shield them from sex abuse claims dating back to the1930s, saying that the state’s revival of the old claims was unconstitutional.

The state in 2002 revived the claims for a single year. In reliance on ...