St. Louis archdiocese must turn in sex-abuse records

ST. LOUIS -- The Archdiocese of St. Louis must turn over records detailing allegations of sexual abuse spanning two decades, a judge has ruled.

The order Monday by St. Louis County Circuit Judge Thomas J. Prebil is part of a lawsuit filed by the parents of a suburban St. Louis man. The suit claims the Florissant, Missouri, man's suicide in 2009 was the result of sexual and emotional abuse by the Rev. Bryan Kuchar when the man was a child.

Defense attorneys said the documents won't be made public and only will be used in the trial. They will cover 20 years of allegations of priest abuse before the alleged abuse of the Florissant man. Attorneys for the parents say the documents are necessary to show a pattern of the archdiocese reassigning priests who have been accused of wrongdoing.

"This order is exactly in line with the law in Missouri," Nicole Gorovsky, an attorney for the parents, said in a statement Wednesday. "The Archdiocese has historical institutional knowledge of abuse within its ranks and must provide it in these types of lawsuits."

The lawsuit claims that Kuchar, a priest at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in Shrewsbury, molested the plaintiffs' son between 1999 and 2002, while the boy attended a camp at the seminary for boys who wanted to learn how to become priests.

The archdiocese suspended Kuchar in 2002, and the Vatican defrocked him in 2006.

Kuchar was convicted in 2003 for molesting a 14-year-old boy when the priest was serving a south St. Louis County parish. He was sentenced to three consecutive one-year jail terms.

The archdiocese has been ordered to turn over multiple years of records before. In 2013, a judge ordered the archdiocese to turn over the names of all priests accused of sexual abuse in the previous 20 years. The names were not made public.

The action was part of a lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed she was abused as a child by the Rev. Joseph Ross, who was later defrocked.