BOSTON - Sharply criticizing the Boston Archdiocese, a judge ordered the public release yesterday of about 11,000 internal church documents related to 65 priests accused of molesting children over the past three decades.
The action by Superior Court Judge Constance Sweeney came as lawyers for alleged victims and the Roman Catholic Church met to try to settle more than 400 lawsuits.
On Friday, the church complied with a court order to hand over the documents to lawyers for alleged victims. But the church asked that the documents be sealed from public view until at least January.
Sweeney rejected the request and chastised the church.
"While the defendants have seemingly produced the documents to opposing counsel at the last minute and under a warning of sanctions and contempt, they still resist public disclosure of those documents," the judge wrote.
"If the tone of this endorsement is harsh, so be it. The court simply will not be toyed with," she wrote.
The judge also ruled in favor of victims' lawyers seeking the psychiatric records of the Rev. Bernard Lane. In her ruling, Sweeney criticized the church's decision to allow Lane to celebrate Mass at a parish in the late 1990s, even after church officials had psychiatric reports showing he had a history of molesting boys.
Sweeney said the records "raise significant questions of whether the archdiocese was really exercising the care they claimed to use in assigning offending priests."