Accused of abuse

Nearly 1,700 clergy living in communities with no oversight

Almost 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found.

These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middleschool math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping atrisk kids. They live next to playgrounds and day care centers. They foster and care for children.

And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP’s analysis found.

A recent push by Roman Catholic dioceses across the U.S. to publish the names of

Roughly 190 obtained professional licenses to work in education, medicine, social work and counseling.

clergy members it considers to be credibly accused has opened a window into the daunting problem of how to monitor and track priests who often were never criminally charged and, in many cases, were removed from or left the church to live as private citizens.

Each diocese determines its own standard to deem a priest credibly accused, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate conversations or unwanted hugging to forced sodomy or rape.

Dioceses and religious orders so far have shared the names of more than 5,100 credibly accused clergy members, more than threequarters of them in the last year. The AP researched the nearly 2,000 who remain alive to determine where they have lived and worked — the largestscale review to date of what happened to priests named as possible sexual abusers.

The review found more than 160 continued working or volunteering in churches, including dozens in Catholic dioceses overseas. Roughly 190 obtained professional licenses to work in education, medicine, social work and counseling — including 76 who, as of August, still had valid credentials in those fields.

The research also turned up cases where the priests were once again able to prey on victims.

It also has left dioceses struggling with how — or if — former employees should be tracked and monitored. Victims’ advocates have pushed for more oversight, but church officials say what’s being requested extends beyond what they legally can do. And civil authorities like police departments or prosecutors say their purview is limited to people convicted of crimes.

That means the heavy lift of tracking former priests has fallen to citizen watchdogs and victims, whose complaints have fueled suspensions, removals and firings. But even then, loopholes in state laws allow many former clergy to keep their new jobs even when the history of allegations becomes public.

“Defrocked or not, we’ve

long argued that bishops can’t recruit, hire, ordain, supervise, shield, transfer and protect predator priests, then suddenly oust them and claim to be powerless over their whereabouts and activities,“said David Clohessy, the former executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who now heads the group’s St. Louis chapter.

The AP’s analysis found that more than 310 of the 2,000 credibly accused clergy members have been charged with crimes for actions that took place when they were priests. Beyond that, the AP confirmed that Sinclair and 64 others have been charged with crimes committed after leaving the church.

Hundreds of these priests chose careers that put them in new positions of trust and authority, including jobs in which they dealt with children and survivors of sexual abuse, the AP found.

School administrators in Cinnaminson, N.J., knew for years that sixthgrade teacher Joseph Michael DeShan had been forced from the priesthood for impregnating a teen parishioner. But nearly two decades later, he remained in a classroom.

DeShan, now 60, left the Bridgeport, Conn., diocese in 1989 after admitting having sex with the girl beginning when she was 14. Two years later, she got pregnant and gave birth. The diocese did not report DeShan to the police, and he was never prosecuted.

By 2002, he was working as a teacher in Cinnaminson when church disclosures about his past raised alarms. After a brief investigation, administrators allowed DeShan to return to the classroom, where he remained until last year, when a new generation of parents renewed cries for his removal.

The school board tried to fire him, citing both his conduct as a priest and recent remarks to a student about her “pretty green eyes.” In April, a state arbitrator ruled against the district, saying it had been “long aware” of DeShan’s conduct as a priest.

The state confirmed DeShan, who did not return calls for comment, still holds a valid teaching license, but that the licensing board is seeking to revoke it. Parents say he is not in a classroom this fall,

but his profile remains posted on the school website and the idea he could be allowed back is troubling, said Cornell Jones, whose daughter was in DeShan’s class last year.

When the first big wave of the clergy abuse scandal hit Roman Catholic dioceses in the early 2000s, the U.S. bishops had reacted by creating the Dallas Charter, a baseline for sexual abuse reporting, training and other procedures to prevent abuse. A handful of canon lawyers and experts at the time said every diocese should be transparent, name priests that had been accused of abuse and, in many cases, get rid of them.

Most dioceses decided against naming priests, however. And among the dioceses that have released lists since then, some merely provided names, without details of the allegations that led to their inclusion, the dates of the priests’ assignments or the parishes where they served.

“The Dallas Charter was supposed to fix everything. It was supposed to make the abuse scandal history. But that didn’t happen,“said the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer who had tried to warn the bishops that abuse was widespread.

After the charter was established in 2002, some critics say dioceses were more likely to simply defrock priests and return them to private citizenship.

“If these guys simply left and disappeared somewhere, it wouldn’t be a problem,” Doyle said. “But they don’t. They get jobs and create spaces where they can get access to and abuse children again.“

Deacon Bernie Nojadera, the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection, noted that solving the monitoring issue is not a simple equation, since decisions default to the individual bishops in each diocese and the conference issues no overarching guidance that must be followed.

“We have 197 different ways that the Dallas Charter is being implemented. It’s a road map, a bare minimum,” Nojadera said. “We do talk about situations where these men are being laicized and what happens to them. And our canon lawyers are quick to say there is no purview to monitor them.”