Lori needs to come clean

This past Sunday, on the first page of my Catholic parish’s bulletin, our pastor exhorted us to “orient our apostolic action toward bringing about a culture, within and outside the Church, capable of ensuring that situations of abuse are not repeated and that a healthy life is guaranteed to all human beings.” As Catholics in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, we cannot “ensure that situations of abuse are not repeated” until we know what acts of abuse occurred here, including how those abusive acts were covered up and by whom (“Archbishop Lori speaks of ‘heavy burden’ on shoulders of Catholic school educators amid church crisis,” Aug. 29).

Ironically, included in the same bulletin was a list of questions and answers printed by the Archdiocese of Baltimore. In response to one of the questions, the archdiocese reiterated its long-held position that it will not release its files on abusive priests for three reasons. The first is that it has provided the names of “all known priests who have been credibly accused of abuse.” But we as the laity can no longer trust the hierarchy to develop best practices to prevent abuse when the archdiocese will provide us only the names of the abusers. We know who the abusers are, but, for example, we do not know what their superiors did in response to the complaints of abuse. Until we understand what the abusers did, why, and what was done in response to complaints of the abuse, we cannot fix the church.

The second reason given is that such a disclosure would violate privacy laws. Invoking privacy laws to protect from disclosure acts of criminal abuse and the cover-up of those acts is, simply, sinful. Had the archdiocese timely notified the police of abuse, the public would have had access to the investigations conducted by law enforcement.

The third reason given is that some survivors “worry” about the risk disclosure poses to their privacy. If victims have this concern, the problem can easily be solved by blacking out their names. Lawyers do it all the time.

To the extent that Archbishop Lori continues to assert these defenses, presumably crafted by the church’s lawyers, his excellency is complicit in the cover-up and part of our catastrophic problem. Archbishop Lori needs to stop listening to his lawyers and truly begin the process of healing his flock or resign as our archbishop.