After Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, woman sues church for fraud

[Ian David]

MILWAUKEE — After a state Supreme Court ruling cleared the way, a woman who alleges a priest molested her as a girl filed suit Thursday accusing the Milwaukee Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the Diocese of Sioux Falls, S.D., of fraud for covering up the man’s history of sexual abuse. The Wisconsin Supreme Court held in a decision only last week that the church could be sued for fraud in such cases.

The lawsuit filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court details the alleged fraudulent coverups when the priest abused girls while being moved among parishes in his South Dakota diocese, in the Milwaukee archdiocese and back in South Dakota in the 1960s and 1970s.

The priest, Bruce MacArthur, later was sent to Texas and served prison time there after being convicted of trying to rape a woman in a nursing home.

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MacArthur, who now lives in a residence outside St. Louis for abusive priests, described himself on the videotape as a “rotten priest” with “no way of stopping his abuse.”

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