Mexican cardinal won't face U.S. trial in sex-abuse suit

A California judge ruled Tuesday that the Mexican cardinal who leads the world's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese can't be sued in the United States on allegations that he covered up the actions of a pedophile priest.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle said his court lacked jurisdiction to hear a civil suit brought against Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City by a Mexican-born man who says he was molested by a priest Rivera once oversaw. Berle said the case should be heard in Mexico.

The accuser, Joaquin Aguilar Mendez, alleged that Rivera and Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony conspired to cover up the actions of the pedophile priest in the late 1980s and that their actions allowed him to remain a practicing priest in Mexico and abuse Aguilar in 1994.

The priest, the Rev. Nicolas Aguilar Rivera, transferred to Los Angeles from Mexico and returned to Mexico after he was charged in Los Angeles with 19 counts of child sexual abuse. The priest is no relation to the cardinal or the plaintiff.

"It is evident this [conspiracy] didn't exist," Bernardo Fernandez del Castillo, an attorney for the cardinal, said in a telephone interview after the decision. The attorney said he'd spoken with Rivera after the ruling and the cardinal was grateful for the outcome.

"Justice was done," Fernandez said.

The case drew international attention because it featured two of the church's most powerful clergymen pointing fingers of blame at each other over sex-abuse allegations that have roiled the Roman Catholic Church. Rivera is believed to have been one of the five finalists to succeed the late Pope John Paul II, and he remains a potential successor to Pope Benedict XVI.

In recent years, the U.S. church has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle sex-abuse complaints in California, Washington, Oregon, Kentucky, Massachusetts and elsewhere.

Michael Finnegan, an attorney for Jeff Anderson & Associates, the Minnesota law firm that's suing Rivera and Mahony, said the firm would pursue litigation in Mexico against Rivera and would continue its litigation against Mahony in Los Angeles.

The priest's location is unknown, Finnegan said.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.