ABSTRACT
Religious authority is a central factor in the analysis made by state courts of the liability of ecclesiastical entities for the acts of sex abuse of those ministers who are incardinated in or carry out their ministry in the ecclesiastical entity held responsible. Church officials are perceived as having real power over clergy and community members, including appointing, training, and supervisory obligations. If the civil wrong is understood to have occurred in a religious context, the presumption that the Church official or ecclesiastical entity breached those obligations is increasingly unrebuttable. Alternatively, some state courts have adopted rules of enterprise risk liability; so if a minister commits a civil wrong through an abuse of religious power, the Church official or ecclesiastical entity that gave the minister that power through ordination or appointment should bear the burden of the risk it introduced into society. In this regard, law enforcers often use religious norms and religious symbols as evidence of intra-Church relationships and religious authority. However, and despite the efforts of churches to solve the problem, the analysis made by state courts is often at odds with how the Catholic Church and other religious communities perceive those same norms and symbols, sometimes forcing religious doctrines into purely secular categories that deprive them of a substantial part of their meaning.
