How the church hid child abuse
Pennsylvania grand jury details how the Catholic Church allegedly covered up the abuse of 1,000 children over a period of 70 years
Pennsylvania grand jury details sex attacks on 1,000 children over a period of 70 years |
The 1,356-page report from Pennsylvania begins with a plea: “We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this.”
The Roman Catholic Church’s darkest secrets start tumbling out not long afterward. In the Diocese of Allentown, one priest was confronted by his superiors and said: “Please help me. I sexually molested a boy.”
The diocese indeed helped him by letting the priest serve for several more years after the diocese concluded that “the experience will not necessarily be a horrendous trauma” for the boy, the report says. In the Diocese of Erie, one priest confessed to raping at least 15 boys, who were as young as 7-years old. He was not removed from the priesthood until years later. The bishop ordered the parish to not say why, adding, “Nothing else need be noted.”
The landmark report into Catholic priest abuse released Tuesday in Pennsylvania — the culmination of a twoyear grand jury investigation launched by the state’s attorney general — is the broadest examination yet by a government agency in the US of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The grand jury identified 301 “predator priests” who abused more than 1,000 children in six of Pennsylvania’s eight dioceses, with the “real number” of victims thought to be in the thousands.
It catalogs horrific instances of abuse: a priest who raped a young girl in the hospital after she had her tonsils out; a victim tied up and whipped with leather straps by a priest; and another priest who was allowed to stay in ministry after impregnating a young girl and arranging for her to have an abortion.
The sexual abuse scandal has shaken the Catholic Church for more than 15 years. But even after paying billions of dollars in settlements and adding new prevention programmes, the church has been dogged by a scandal that is now reaching its highest ranks. The Pennsylvania report comes soon after the resignation of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, who is accused of sexually abusing young priests and seminarians, as well as minors.
“Despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability,” the grand jury wrote. One bishop named in the report as vouching for an abusive priest was Cardinal Donald Wuerl, now the archbishop of Washington. “Until that changes, we think it is too early to close the book on the Catholic Church sex scandal,” the grand jury wrote.
Prayers for victims
Pennsylvania’s Catholic bishops called for prayers for victims and for the church, promised greater openness and said that measures instituted in recent years were already making the church safer. But several bishops, including Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh, rejected the idea the church had concealed abuse. “There was no cover-up going on,” Zubik said in a news conference. “We have over the course of the last 30 years, for sure, been transparent about everything that has in fact been transpiring.”
Church officials followed a “playbook for concealing the truth,” the grand jury said, minimising the abuse by using words like “inappropriate contact” instead of “rape”; assigning priests untrained in sexual abuse cases to investigate their colleagues; and not informing the community of the real reasons behind removing an accused priest. “Tell his parishioners that he is on ‘sick leave,’ or suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion,” the report said.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a news conference: “They protected their institution at all costs. As the grand jury found, the church showed a complete disdain for victims.” He said that the coverup by senior church officials “stretched in some cases all the way up to the Vatican.”
Shapiro was surrounded by about 20 abuse victims and their family members, who gasped and wept when he revealed that
From her hospital bed, she asked that we tell the world
one priest had abused five sisters in the same family, including one girl beginning when she was 18 months old.
Some victims said in interviews that they were relieved to finally be heard and to have their perpetrators publicly named. “I had gone to two bishops with allegations over five years, and they ignored and downplayed my allegations,” said the Reverend James Faluszczak, an Erie priest on extended leave who was abused as a child and who testified before the grand jury. “It’s that very management of secrets that has given cover to predators.”
For others, it was too little, too late. Frances Samber, whose brother was abused by a priest in Pittsburgh and committed suicide in 2010, said: “It’s good that the public sees this, but where is the justice? Why aren’t these people in prison?”
One of the victims who had testified before the grand jury tried to commit suicide while they were deliberating. “From her hospital bed, she asked for one thing,” the grand jury wrote in the report: “That we finish our work and tell the world what really happened.”