Catholic Church struggles with sex abuse

Pa. grand jury report found progress, but cover-ups continue

In an internal diocese memo from Erie in northwestern Pennsylvania, a priest admitted to being “aroused” while tutoring a boy, hugging him and sharing sexually suggestive text messages with multiple boys.

The priest’s bishop admonished him to “cease and desist,” but Catholic Church leaders didn’t pass that information along to authorities until six years later – and only then in response to a grand jury subpoena.

The Rev. David Poulson resigned from the diocese this past February, three months before he was charged with sexually abusing two boys.

Poulson’s case is an example of how abuse and cover-up continue to plague the Catholic Church, even after the issue first exploded into the national consciousness some 16 years ago in Boston. Since then, the church has vowed to make improvements and paid out billions of dollars of parishioners’ tithes to victims.

In July, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who is alleged to have sexually abused a minor 47 years ago.

And in Pennsylvania, Poulson was one of the 301 predator priests identified in a sweeping grand jury report released Tuesday that detailed child sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses and religious leaders’ efforts to cover it up. The investigation identified more than 1,000 victims.

“There is an entrenched infrastructure of secrecy in the Catholic Church that continues to reward concealment rather than disclosure,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of Bishop Accountability, a group that collects data and researches sex abuse in the church.

Much remains hidden still about clergy sex abuse, she said. That is why the Catholic Church continues to struggle with it.

Most of Tuesday’s grand jury report, one of the most extensive public accountings of abuse within the Catholic Church to date, deals with events before the early 2000s. And the report points to promising signs in the past 16 years, saying victims “are no longer quite so invisible.”

Still, the scandals and cover-ups have continued. In multiple states, the church has resisted efforts to reform statute-of-limitation laws to allow people abused as children, sometimes decades ago, to seek compensation through civil lawsuits.

“It prevents more victims if we get exposure,” said Florida lawyer Michael Dolce, who is a child-sex-abuse survivor and advocated for Florida to repeal its statute crimes.

The grand jury report and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro were critical of actions the church took since 2002:

In 2002, a victim inspired by the revelation of abuse in the Boston Archdiocese reported that a priest in the Allentown Diocese abused her. The district attorney didn’t pursue a criminal case, citing the statute of limitations, and the diocese and its lawyer “attempted to undermine and discredit” the victim and her family, according to the grand jury report.

In June 2002, the bishop in the Erie diocese wrote to a victim that he was shocked the victim would “go to the press directly rather than contact me regarding the past.”

“Only when they’ve been forced again into a corner are they doing the right thing,” state Rep. Mark Rozzi, who testified before the grand jury as an abuse victim, said.

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