Are the estimates of victims and offenders too low in California?

Group asks state Attorney General Becerra for grand jury investigation

A Catholic abuse victim’s advocacy group sent a letter Wednesday to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra asking for an independent statewide probe into decades of priest molestations and the church’s pattern of covering up the abuse, similar to the groundbreaking grand jury report released earlier this month in Pennsylvania.

SNAP called for Catholics across the nation, including its membership of 25,000 survivors and supporters, to contact their states’ top prosecutor, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice, and demand a grand jury probe. Statewide investigations would help unveil a decadeslong scandal that has come out in dribs and drabs through lawsuits, news stories and smaller probes.

“The only recourse those harmed as children have is to call on the government to expose the true extent of the problem, so that both officials and the public can understand the necessity for statute of limitations reform,” wrote Melanie Sakoda, a Pleasant Hill member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, in a letter she sent to Becerra. “I am calling on you to use the power of your office to mount an investigation into sexual crimes against minors by Catholic clergy and their cover up by Church officials within the state of California.”

Becerra’s office did not immediately return a request for comment, but last week said it does not comment on any potential investigations.

The 1,400-page grand jury report in Pennsylvania looked at six Catholic diocese over seven decades and found more than 300 priests had sexually abused children and were protected by a church hierarchy. The probe, one of the broadest looks into the scandal to date, identified 1,000 child victims, but warned that there were probably thousands more. The grand jury reviewed more than two million documents during the 18-month investigation.

SNAP members want that to happen in California and across the country to finally expose the full extent of the church’s behavior.

“The Pennsylvania grand jury report proves conclusively that church gener-

ated data is not accurate or trustworthy,” said Dan McNevin, a member of SNAP who was abused by a priest in Fremont. “The only way to understand the true scope of the California diocesan sex abuse problem is for civil authorities, with subpoena power, to empanel grand juries or in some other way professionally investigate each Diocese.”

He said to fully understand the “cover-up” is to investigate California’s bishops who oversaw the parishes, many who are still alive and could testify.

SNAP and the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein this week calling for a nationwide investigation into the “systemwide network of sexual violence and cover-up.”

In the early 2000s, dioceses in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Stockton and elsewhere were roiled in scandal as dozens of priests were exposed and victims began to sue, bankrupting some churches. While the church has publicly acknowledged many victims and the priests who abused them, SNAP officials believe those numbers are severely undercounted in California.

California has almost 11 million Catholic parishioners, according to the church. Pennsylvania has about 1.8 million parishioners in the six diocese investigated, according to the grand jury report, although that probe did not include the large archdiocese of Philadelphia, which covers several counties and was the subject of two separate grand jury investigations in 2005 and 2011.

In California, the church has admitted to more than 500 abusers and 1,100 victims in a dozen diocese, McNiven said. But given that California has about six times more Catholics than those included in the new grand jury report, the group believes that the extent of this state’s problem is much bigger than previously known, he said.

“California likely has thousands of priests who abused, not the hundreds reported by the 12 California Catholic dioceses,” McNiven said. “And the victim count, if a grand jury is convened with the same powers as that of the Pennsylvania grand jury, likely will discover closer to 10,000 victims instead of the lower fraction purported by the 12 dioceses.”

Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University who treats church victims and abusers and has studied the topic, said the Pennsylvania report found that about 8 percent of priests in those six diocese offended between 1947 and 2018. That offending rate, if extrapolated to California, would also significantly inflate the number of priest abusers here.

However, Plante said he believes Pennsylvania was a “hot spot.” His research has determined that the church countrywide had a 4 percent offender rate during the last half of the 20th century. Unlike SNAP, he said the numbers of victims and offenders the church has recognized in California is “pretty accurate,” and there’s no need for a grand jury report.

“I just don’t see what the point is,” he said. “These are all old stories that we already know about.”