Opinion ID: 1281541
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Allegations of the Complaint

Text: As stated above, the Nally I Court of Appeal reversed, in a published opinion, a summary judgment for defendants. In the first two counts of the complaint, alleging wrongful death based on clergyman malpractice and negligence, plaintiffs asserted that defendant Church was negligent in the training, selection and hiring of its spiritual counselors. Plaintiffs also claimed that following Nally's suicide attempt by drug overdose, defendants failed to make themselves available to Nally for counseling and actively and affirmatively dissuaded and discouraged [Nally] from seeking further professional psychological and/or psychiatric care. The third count incorporated the negligence allegations by reference and charged defendants with outrageous conduct for teaching certain Protestant religious doctrines that conflicted with Nally's Catholic upbringing and which otherwise exacerbated Nally's pre-existing feelings of guilt, anxiety and depression. (In this context, plaintiffs claimed one of the defendants told Nally that his temporarily paralyzed arm caused by his suicide attempt was God punishing him for his sin.) Plaintiffs also alleged that defendants' conduct in counseling Nally was outrageous because they taught or otherwise imbued [Nally], whom they knew to be depressed and having entertained suicidal thoughts, with the notion that if he had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, [he] would still be accepted into heaven if he committed suicide. Here, plaintiffs relied on Thomson's statement to Nally 11 days before his suicide that one who is saved is always saved, and on a short passage taken from a 12-part tape-recorded series, entitled Rich Thomson: Principles of Biblical Counseling, that was a recording of Pastor Thomson's 1980 classroom lectures to seminary students. The tape-recorded passage was recorded 18 months after Nally's suicide and stated, in pertinent part: And the suicidal says, `I am under such tremendous pressure, now I've got to have pleasure of release! Now! I don't care about the future! That's characteristic of human nature. So it is very characteristic of the suicidal that it is his fear of judgment that drives him into the death after which he will face that judgment, if he's an unbeliever. And after which, if he is a believer, he'll go to be with the Lord....