At 81 and in poor health, Ralph White Jr. is not confident he will live to see a dime from the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.
But White voiced relief yesterday that a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court had ordered the church to respond to his lawsuit alleging his pastor sexually abused him in the 1940s, when he was a boy, and later took his inheritance.
White, of West Philadelphia, is seeking unspecified damages from the five-county diocese and All Saints parish in Wynnewood, and the return of his modest inheritance.