Vatican shares perv-priest blame: AG

The Catholic Church’s cover-up of a Pennsylvania priest sex-abuse scandal goes “all the way up to the Vatican,” the state’s attorney general claimed Tuesday.

“There are specific examples where when the abuse occurred, the priests would go, the bishops would go and lie to parishioners, lie to law enforcement, lie to the public, but then document all of the abuse in secret archives that they would share oftentimes with the Vatican,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said on “CBS This Morning.”

“There are specific examples where the Vatican knew of this abuse and they were involved in the cover-up.”

In response, the Vatican told CBS News: “If the prosecutor is referring to something outside the report, we’ll have to wait for that.”

A Pennsylvania grand-jury report released this month found over 300 priests abused more than 1,000 children for decades in the state.

“They found not only widespread sexual abuse, rape of children, but they found that there was a systematic cover-up that went all the way to the Vatican,” Shapiro said on NBC’s “Today ” of the twoyear grand-jury investigation.

Shapiro said he had “evidence the Vatican had knowledge of the cover-up” in Pennsylvania but that he couldn’t “specifically speak to Pope Francis.”

The pontiff was recently accused by former Vatican official Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò of covering up claims of sexual abuse by Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, the former archbishop of Newark and Washington, DC.