Report: Catholic Church still struggles with abuse
Pa. grand jury report found progress, but cover-ups and secrecy continue
The totals are staggering: 301 predator priests, more than 1,000 victims. In its report, a Pennsylvania grand jury cites examples of the Catholic Church trying to keep sexual-abuse victims quiet.
In an internal diocese memo from Erie, 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 in 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, 16 years after the issue exploded into the national consciousness in Boston. Since then, the church has vowed to make improvements and paid out billions of dollars of parishioners’ tithes to victims.
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 BishopAccountablity.org, a group that researches sex abuse in the church.
Much remains hidden still about clergy sex abuse across the USA, she said. That is why the Catholic Church continues to struggle with it.
Most of Tuesday’s grand jury report deals with events before the early 2000s. And it points to promising signs in the past 16 years, saying victims “are no longer quite so invisible.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002. It set procedures for addressing allegations of clergy sexual abuse of minors and came after The Boston Globe’s investigation into priest abuse.
Still, the scandals and cover-ups have continued. The church has resisted efforts to reform states’ statute-oflimitation laws to allow people abused as children, some decades ago, to seek compensation through civil lawsuits.
“It prevents more victims if we get exposure,” said lawyer Michael Dolce, a child-sex-abuse survivor who advocated for Florida to repeal its statute of limitations for such crimes.
“Only when they’ve been forced again into a corner are they doing the right thing,” state Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Pennsylvania legislator who testified before the grand jury as an abuse victim, said Wednesday in a radio interview. Without the grand juries, “they would still be doing exactly what they have always done.”
Ed Mahon reports for the York (Pa.) Daily Record, Holly Meyer reports for the Nashville Tennessean and Xerxes Wilson reports for the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal.