Loftus told the jury about experiments in which she and colleagues had successfully planted false memories in study participants’ minds. “Even traumatic experiences can be subjected to post-event suggestion,” Loftus said. “False memories … can be very vivid, detailed. People can be confident about them, people can be emotional about them, even though they’re false.”

“Fr. McCarthy’s name on a list of clerics credibly accused of abusing a minor is demonstrably false and his removal from ministry is declared invalid, and his name is to be removed from the list of Priests Credibly Accused of Sexually Abusing a Minor,” the Vatican said in the press release. “The Diocese of Monterey is genuinely sorry for the damage done to Father McCarthy and his personal and priestly reputation by its error in falsely identifying him as ‘credibly accused of sexually abusing a minor,’” the release stated.

The Diocesan Review Board’s determination does not mean the allegations are true and that the priest is guilty, only that the panel believes them to be credible. “But that determination is enough to get the priest removed from service,” a spokesperson from the diocese told the Chronicle. The priest will no longer be permitted to celebrate Mass publicly or exercise any public ministry; he cannot live in an ecclesiastical residence, and his name will be added to the List of Credibly Accused Priests on the Diocese of Brooklyn website.

The judge in his ruling said the Bishop did not know the risk the priest posed and that the clergy acted “outside the scope of their employment by molesting Templeton.” He continued by writing the priest’s actions “cannot be attributed to the bishop.”

Clerics who sexually abuse minors can be canonically prosecuted even when they say they were not aware that a person with whom they had sexual contact was a minor, according to changes to canon law announced by the Vatican on Tuesday. The reform of the law, authorized by Pope Francis, follows cases in which clerics claimed they did not know the age of a minor with whom they had sexual contact, or believed them to be more than 18 years old.