It had charged that Trautman "took his playbook of covering up clergy abuse from Buffalo, New York, to Erie, Pennsylvania… where he continued to carry out the aforesaid cover up for decades."
The lawsuit takes advantage of the Child Victims Act, which created a new legal window for sex abuse victims to sue regardless of statutes of limitations.
Bishop Trautman in March filed a request to have the suit dismissed, and is challenging the Child Victims Act.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Shapiro criticized Trautman at an August 2018 press conference releasing his grand jury report on clergy sex abuse. He alleged that the bishop failed aggressively to pursue an abuser. He has charged that the Erie diocese under Trautman curbed its investigation of sex abuse claims to wait out the statute of limitations.
Trautman in his responses to the attorney general said the claims were "baseless." He said he did not condone or enable such abuse during his tenure leading the Diocese of Erie, and he stressed his support for abuse victims and said the report does not fully or accurately assess his record. He cited a Pennsylvania Supreme Court finding that the grand jury process suffers "limitations upon its truth-finding capabilities" and lacked "basic fairness."
Shapiro's report, released in August 2018, claimed to have identified more than 1,000 victims of 301 credibly accused priests in Pennsylvania. It presented a devastating portrait of alleged efforts by Church authorities to ignore, obscure, or cover up allegations-either to protect accused priests or to spare the Church scandal.
Trautman had caused controversy by criticizing the report.
"We should not be so naive as to accept every government
report every attorney general report as being totally accurate or honest and I wouldn't cite the Philadelphia Inquirer or Boston Globe as sources of confident information," he said at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' general assembly in fall 2018.
Bishop Persico, his successor in Erie, has been publicly supportive of abuse victims. He said Trautman spoke as a retired bishop, adding, "he doesn't represent the diocese so what he's doing is giving his opinion."
The attorney general report has come under criticism from longtime Catholic commentator Peter Steinfels. In a lengthy essay published in January 2019 by the magazine Commonweal, Steinfels argued that many of the report's charges are "grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust." He said the report deserved more thorough scrutiny and said its "sensational charges" have been too easily accepted.