Arizona's top court says churches, not judges, decide what clergy must report about abuse

The Supreme Court of Arizona ruled on 30 July 2026 that when clergy decide, on doctrinal grounds, not to report a confession of child sexual abuse to the authorities, neither a judge nor a jury may examine whether they read their own doctrine correctly. The judgment, in Doe v The Corporation, docket CV-25-0213-PR, was unanimous. It reinstated summary judgment for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and two of its bishops, and reversed a Court of Appeals decision that had sent the question to a jury.

The underlying facts were not in dispute. Three children, suing through representatives, said their father had sexually abused them over several years, and that during that period he disclosed what he was doing to two bishops of his church: first in private meetings, then in a formal disciplinary council at which other church members were present. The bishops treated the disclosures as confidential under church doctrine and reported nothing. Police found the evidence themselves years later. The father was charged in 2017 and later died.

Arizona's mandatory reporting statute lists clergy among those who must report suspected child abuse, but exempts information a member of the clergy receives in a confession or similar confidential communication where withholding it is, in the clergy member's judgment, reasonable and necessary under the tenets of that religion. The Cochise County Superior Court held the exemption applied. The Court of Appeals disagreed, finding live factual disputes about whether the communications were genuinely confidential, whether the presence of non-clergy at the disciplinary council destroyed that confidentiality, and whether the church's own doctrine in fact required silence.

The Supreme Court restored the trial court's judgment on constitutional rather than statutory grounds. The First Amendment, it held, forecloses judicial inquiry into whether clergy applied their faith's teachings correctly. Absent fraud or collusion for secular purposes, a factfinder must defer to the religious institution's own definitions of confession, confidential communication and clergy. The practical effect is that the church, not the legislature or the courts, sets the outer boundary of a reporting duty the state wrote.

Twelve days later the same court reached the opposite result for a different defendant. In Rodriguez-Ramirez v State of Arizona, decided 12 August 2026, a Phoenix pastor tried to suppress a secret recording in which he acknowledged a sexual offence to his co-pastor. The court adopted a four part test for the clergy-penitent privilege: whether the recipient is clergy according to the customs and laws of the church, whether the communication was made in a professional capacity, whether it was made within the discipline enjoined by the church, and whether it was a confession, meaning a confidential admission of a crime, sin or fault made in the search for spiritual absolution, consolation or guidance. Because the conversation was concerned with reputation and legal exposure rather than absolution, the privilege did not attach. The Arizona Appellate Blog, writing on 14 August 2026, noted that the court also corrected the Court of Appeals for conflating the evidentiary privilege with the statutory reporting exemption. They are separate instruments, and the second decision narrows the privilege while the first widens the exemption.

The Australian trajectory has been the reverse. On 12 February 2026 the High Court decided AA v The Trustees of the Roman Catholic Church for the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle [2026] HCA 2, holding by five to two that a diocese owed a non-delegable duty of care to a child abused by its clergy and could be directly liable for that abuse, overruling the part of New South Wales v Lepore [2003] HCA 4 that had said intentional criminal acts could not breach such a duty. Australian legislatures have also removed the confessional exemption from reporting duties in several jurisdictions since the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse reported in December 2017, though the Catholic Church has consistently said its priests will not comply.

Neither position has settled. In the United States at least six states already refuse to recognise a confessional privilege in child abuse cases, and Washington's 2026 statute abolishing it has been held up by litigation. Bills in Missouri and Vermont died in committee in the northern spring of 2026. The Supreme Court of the United States will hear argument on 3 November 2026 in St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy, a Colorado preschool case testing how far Employment Division v Smith still shields neutral laws of general application from religious objection.

What the Arizona judgment does not say is how a court would recognise the fraud or collusion exception it preserved, given that it has also forbidden itself from asking what a church's doctrine actually requires. No party has yet tested that boundary.