Philadelphia priest says cardinal ordered abuse list shredded PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The highest ranking cleric charged in a Philadelphia child abuse scandal asked a judge on Friday to dismiss his case because his boss - the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua - ordered the shredding of a list he made of predator priests. The real criminals, the lawyers argued in court documents, were Bevilacqua, who died last month, and his closest advisors. These included Lynn's former supervisor Monsignor James Molloy, who died in 2006, now retired Bishop Edward Cullen of Allentown and Bishop Joseph Cistone, now head of the diocese in Saginaw, Michigan, none of whom were charged in the case. He culled the names from a list of 323 priests in the church's "secret archives," the court documents said. Lynn handed the list over to Bevilacqua in 1994 and it was discussed at a meeting in March of that year between Bevilacqua, Molloy, Cullen and Cistone. Bevilacqua at the time ordered Molloy to destroy the list, and Molloy recorded the directive in a handwritten memorandum, the court documents said. Bevilacqua, 88, who was to have been a witness in the trial, died on January 31 after suffering from dementia and cancer. After Bevilacqua's death last month, a locksmith was called in to open a safe at the archdiocese headquarters and inside were copies of both the list of 35 predator priests and the memorandum that it had been destroyed. "Unbeknownst to anyone else and in violation of the cardinal's directive, Monsignor Molloy preserved a copy of this list in a different place - a safe to which no one else had a combination," the court documents said. "The manner in which this memo was discovered is as shocking as its contents," the court filing said. "As this newfound memorandum proves, the District Attorney's Office is entirely correct in its belief and assertion that an overarching Archdiocesan conspiracy existed in Philadelphia in the 1990s," said the court documents filed by Lynn's lawyers, who are paid by the Philadelphia Archdiocese. "Its participants were Cardinal Bevilacqua, Bishop Cullen, Bishop Cistone and Monsignor Molloy," the court papers said. Appallingly, none of these individuals is on trial. All parties in the case are under a court-issued gag order which restricts them from commenting on the matter.