Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report Reveals Widespread Abuse In Catholic Church
A Pennsylvania Grand Jury report reveals decades of abuse by some 300 Catholic Priests impacting more than 1,000 children and 26 of the state's Roman Catholic Diocese.
As anticipated, a Pennsylvania Grand Jury has issued a searing report that uncovers credible allegations of sexual abuse involving more than 300 Catholic Priests and 1,000 children at 26 of the 28 Roman Catholic Diocese in Pennsylvania:
Bishops and other leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years, persuading victims not to report the abuse and law enforcement not to investigate it, according to a searing report issued by a grand jury on Tuesday.
The report, which covered six of the state’s eight Catholic dioceses and found more than 1,000 identifiable victims, is the broadest examination yet by a government agency in the United States of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The report said there are likely thousands more victims whose records were lost or who were too afraid to come forward.
It catalogs horrific instances of abuse: a priest who raped a young girl in the hospital after she had her tonsils out; a victim tied up and whipped with leather straps by a priest; and another priest who was allowed to stay in ministry after impregnating a young girl and arranging for her to have an abortion.
The sexual abuse scandal has shaken the Catholic Church for more than 15 years, ever since explosive allegations emerged out of Boston in 2002. But even after paying billions of dollars in settlements and adding new prevention programs, the church has been dogged by a scandal that is now reaching its highest ranks. The Pennsylvania report comes soon after the resignation of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, who is accused of sexually abusing young priests and seminarians, as well as minors.
“Despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability,” the grand jury wrote. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”
The grand jury said that while some accused priests were removed from ministry, the church officials who protected them remained in office or even got promotions. One bishop named in the report as vouching for an abusive priest was Cardinal Donald Wuerl, now the archbishop of Washington. “Until that changes, we think it is too early to close the book on the Catholic Church sex scandal,” the jury wrote.
The report is unlikely to lead to new criminal charges or civil lawsuits under the current law because the statute of limitations has expired. Only two of the cases in the report so far have led to criminal charges.
In statements released on Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s Catholic bishops called for prayers for victims and for the church, promised greater openness and said that measures instituted in recent years were already making the church safer.
But several bishops, including Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh, rejected the idea the church had concealed abuse.
“There was no cover-up going on,” Bishop Zubik said in a news conference on Tuesday. “I think that it’s important to be able to state that. We have over the course of the last 30 years, for sure, been transparent about everything that has in fact been transpiring.”
Church officials followed a “playbook for concealing the truth,” the grand jury said, minimizing the abuse by using words like “inappropriate contact” instead of “rape”; assigning priests untrained in sexual abuse cases to investigate their colleagues; and not informing the community of the real reasons behind removing an accused priest.
“Tell his parishioners that he is on ‘sick leave,’ or suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion.’ Or say nothing at all,” the report said.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office initiated the investigation, said in a news conference, “They protected their institution at all costs. As the grand jury found, the church showed a complete disdain for victims.”
He said that the cover-up by senior church officials “stretched in some cases all the way up to the Vatican.”
(…)
The Pennsylvania grand jury met for two years, reviewed 500,000 documents from dioceses’ secret archives, and heard testimony from dozens of victims and the bishop of Erie. The report covers the dioceses of Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton. Two of the dioceses — Greensburg and Harrisburg — tried to quash the grand jury investigation last year, but later backed off that stance.
The report lists each of the accused priests and documents how they were sent from parish to parish, and even sometimes out of state. The grand jury said that while the list is long, “we don’t think we got them all.” The report added, “We feel certain that many victims never came forward, and that the dioceses did not create written records every single time they heard something about abuse.”
In the Greensburg diocese, the Rev. John Sweeney was charged by the attorney general’s office with sexually abusing a boy in the early 1990s. Father Sweeney pleaded guilty this month and awaits sentencing. In the Erie diocese, the Rev. David Poulson was arrested in May and charged with sexually assaulting a boy for eight years, starting at age 8. Father Poulson has yet to enter a plea.
The Pennsylvania State Legislature has so far resisted calls to lift the statute of limitations, which has prevented childhood victims from filing civil lawsuits against the church after they turn 30. For many victims, it has taken decades to gain the courage to speak about the abuse, long past when the law would allow them to sue.
The grand jury and the attorney general strongly recommended that the statute of limitations be extended in civil and criminal cases. They recommended opening a temporary “window” that would permit older victims to file civil lawsuits against perpetrators, and the church.
The church has lobbied against any change to the statute or to open such a window, its efforts led by Bishop Ronald W. Gainer of Harrisburg, president of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference. But abuse survivors and advocates say that in September they plan to begin a fresh campaign to press lawmakers and Bishop Gainer to drop their opposition.
“If this doesn’t start a serious debate on the elimination of the statute of limitation, there’s something seriously wrong with my fellow Pennsylvanians,” said Shaun Dougherty, now 48, who testified before the Altoona-Johnstown grand jury about being abused by a priest for three years starting at age 10.
The Grand Jury report, which I’ve embedded below, speaks for itself and can’t really be expanded upon beyond what it actually says. At its core, though, it reveals nearly entire Catholic Church in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to have been engaged in a what can only be described as a conscious and comprehensive effort to cover up evidence of child abuse and protect the Priests who were accused of carrying it out. This is hardly surprising, of course, since it has so much in common with the past reports that we’ve heard regarding individual cases in states such as Massachusetts and elsewhere in the United States as well as the abuse and cover-up allegations that have been made against the Church in nations such as Ireland and Australia, both of which have seen reports of widespread abuse that is roughly as bad as what we’ve seen in the United States. What this report makes plain, though, is that these cases of abuse were far from being isolated incidents and that the cover-ups that we’ve seen were part of what seems to have been routine Church policy. Indeed, it seems as if those cover-ups were so routine that it is hard to believe that the hierarchy of the Church in the United States and in Rome didn’t know what was going on and was not themselves actively or passively involved with protecting these predators disguised as Priests in their midst and with protecting the interests of the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. The welfare of the children who were abused, or the safety of future potential victims, was obviously not something that they cared about or gave much obvious thought to.
At the very least, it strikes me that this report ought to be the spark for further action not only in Pennsylvania but across the country. Changes to the applicable statutes of limitation for both criminal and civil claims of child sexual abuse are an obvious place to start, but even before we get there we need to get a better handle on just how big a problem we’re dealing with. While it may seem like an extreme option, it seems as though the time has come for either national investigation of some kind or Grand Jury investigations similar to what has happened in Pennsylvania in the other 49 states in the nation. Many of those investigations won’t need to be as widespread or long-lasting as the Pennsylvania investigations because the Catholic populations in those states is smaller, but that’s not really an excuse for not ensuring that the truth comes out, and as this report makes clear even after all these years and all the revelations we have become familiar with, that still hasn’t happened.
Dave Schuler has these observations about the report and the overall abuse scandal itself:
There are actually three grave scandals involved. The first and most serious is the child and teen sexual abuse. The second is the coverups by other priests and bishops. The third is that the man under whose papacy many of the abuses took place was canonized. That he created a climate in which the Church hierarchy were predisposed to cover up these abuses and shield the abusers can now hardly be denied.
(…)
In the Catholic tradition forgiveness has three prerequisites: confession of one’s sins, a sincere intention to change one’s actions, and penance. Paying the penalty for one’s actions is not penance. Neither is foisting the costs of your misdeeds on the laity. Confession, reform, and penance by the Catholic clergy and hierarchy are still wanting and long overdue.
The man that Dave refers to in the first paragraph, of course, is the late Pope St. John Paul II who has also been given the honorific title “the Great,” a title that has only been granted to four Popes throughout history, and one that had not been granted to any Pope since the end of the first millennium. Both this honorific and the canonization occurred notwithstanding the fact that, even while John Paul II was still alive, the evidence regarding decades of abuse by Priests not only in the United States, Ireland, and Australia but around the world. Despite these reports, the Pope did nothing and did not speak out in support of the victims at any point before he died. More evidence of what had been going on both before John Paul II’s Papacy and afterward came out after his death during the Papacy of Benedict XVI. Of course, it is worth noting that Benedict himself had been part of the Church hierarchy during this time and was also no doubt aware of what was going on under their watch. Despite this, Benedict presided over his predecessor’s Beatification, and Pope Francis presided over his Canonization. The fact that they did so without even so much as an acknowledgment of the truth of what happened during John Paul’s Papacy is, on its own, evidence of just how deep the corruption is in the Church. Unless and until that is acknowledged, the stain on Catholicism will not be erased.
Here is the report of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury, all 1,163 pages:
Grand Jury Report on Pennsylvania Catholic Church Abuse by Doug Mataconis on Scribd
I don’t know who expels more slime. President Pud or these guys.
OT…Dennison just revoked Brennan’s security clearance in retaliation for criticism. The sound you just hear is America changing in a very fundamental way.
You are now a citizen of Dennisonstan.
I think it’s 6 out of the 8 diocese, not 26 out of 28. And the only reason the other 2 diocese (including Philadelphia, which likely has close to half of the Catholics in the state) were not included is that they had prior grand jury reports on the subject.
Dave Schuler also made another point worth noting. The Church is not the people involved here. One can take a strident view and claim that at some point the people comprising the institution actually are the institution. But I think the body of work of the church supercedes that.
I wasn’t raised in any religion, so I can’t speak to this from any personal experience. But it seems to me that Roman Catholicism wields a much greater sway over its believers than the various mainstream Protestant denominations and Judaism. Did the children and teens who were abused never mention this to their parents? For fear of not being believed?
How is this surprising? The present hierarchy of the Catholic Church has built itself on alienation. Around sixty percentage of American Catholics thinks that priests should be able to marry. That’s the solution to the issue. And what’s the cost? No one except the closeted and the malformed find orthodox theology or natural law to be of any practical use. It’s a bunch of empty bankrupt traditions that exist for the sake of power, and if priests could marry and be women, not a single thing would be lost by the Church.
@Modulo Myself:
Letting priests marry would be a good thing in my opinion, but I doubt it’s “the solution.” I know from experience that there have been a number of child-abuse cases in the Jewish world, despite the fact that rabbis can marry. It’s not as widespread as in Catholicism, true. But I think that has to do more with the size and power of the Catholic Church, something which few other religious groups have. Child sexual abusers aren’t a product of the restrictive system; rather, they are drawn toward positions that give them access to children and protection from the consequences of their actions. That isn’t going to go away simply by removing mandatory celibacy.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but… at what point does RICO prosecution of the church top brass become plausible? You have a multinational organization with a persistent, documented pattern of not only committing specific crimes, but having those crimes both facilitated and covered up by the management. Looks like organized crime to me…
@Guarneri:
What a load of utter bullshit. This isn’t General Motors or Verizon, here, this is an organization that puts itself squarely in the moral sphere. The repeated, widespread, in fact near-universal practice of raping children and protecting the rapists leaves the church without a moral leg to stand on. It is a corrupt, indeed depraved institution.
The Roman Catholic church rapes children. That’s the reality. They so enjoy raping children that they developed an entire, elaborate mechanism for covering it up. Covering it up. Not taking care of victims, no, no, not these servants of Christ, they conspire together to rape children, they meet and formulate plans for concealing the fact that they rape children. They attack and discredit their own victims and you want to wave a crucifix around in the air and tell me it’s not the church? Drop dead.
My wife is devoutly Catholic. While I go to church on Sundays, my faith has been weakened too much over the years by what I see as a Church that has lost its way.
How I feel is partly caused by personal experience. Dear wife, who is employed by the Diocese, got pregnant in late 2002. She had to go on hospital bedrest at 20 weeks. Somewhere around 25 weeks pregnant a Diocesan employee came to my wife at the hospital to inform her that in a short time her pay and health insurance would be stopped.
I stopped this disgrace but not before a whole series of thing happened. My son Daniel was born prematurely at 28 weeks and died 14.5 hours later. Here’s a little bit of that disgrace- 4 or 5 days after Daniel was born I called the HR dept at the diocese to make sure Daniel was put on our insurance. I called from home. Nobody answered. So I borrowed my sister-in-law’s cell phone and called. The phone was answered. The cowards were the screening calls coming from a parent who lost their son.
I could go on but I will say this. The Roman Catholic Church is a bunch of hypocrites. They preach the sanctity of life but if it comes down to dollars or a mother and unborn baby, they will choose the money. Money is more important to them than life. I know from personal experience.
@CSK: Did the children and teens who were abused never mention this to their parents? For fear of not being believed?
That and the fact that child molesting priests were exiled to other parishes across the fruited plain. Apparently in some cases the new Parrish would not know about the pervert assigned to them.
Seems like I read somewhere that parents would not confront depraved clerics because they were members of their family.
But these are vague memories of stories I think I read years ago.
The Church wouldn’t think of doing this today.
Oh. Wait.
The disgraced former head of the Twin Cities Archdiocese, John Nienstedt, still saying Masses in California’s wine country
AUGUST 13, 2018
@Bill: The people who believe in “One God, almighty, creator of heaven and earth…” are the church. Roman Catholicism–along with about a skizzillion other denominations and sects–is a business that those believers have organized in order to better (?) tend to whatever activities they believe “being a Christian” entails.
In business, it’s always about the money . No other program will work for the business because it can’t survive on faith alone. I wish that it wasn’t that way, but I wasn’t put in charge.
Ironically this causes both Drew and Reynolds to be able to make contrary and valid points.
Absolutely correct; those people are officers of the business that is Roman Catholicism (or whoever else abuses children under the color of their business’s authority).
Also correct, but I disagree in that the Roman Catholic [C]hurch is exactly like Verizon or General Motors. It is not the unified collection of people who “believe in one God…”
Do I think that the people who support these various business enterprises should oversee these businesses better? Absolutely. For the most part, though, they have no more control over how their businesses are operated day to day than the shareholders of any other corporations. Just ask the shareholders of Wells Fargo.
I was raised a devout southern Christian boy. That didn’t survive the completely random slaughter in VietNam. Tried and tried for decades to find that lovely sense of resting in the everlasting arms. Cannot over-emphasis that I tried and tried, prayed and prayed for faith and assurance. Never happened.
Finally I said to myself, with the fine education and the depth of theology I’ve gained, let me work this out and accept the conclusions no matter what I find.
Very first conclusion I reached was the if there is in fact a god as the church defines god, why on earth would he (He? She?) need a club? Or – as suggested above – a business?
Secular/’western’ Buddhism is the closest thing to a religion that actually deals with the human experience that I have found.
@Bill: I’m amazed your wife has remained Catholic after those episodes. They were amazingly callous to your family.
@Bill: Thank you for sharing your story.
I hope you can confirm something for me. Some years ago I made an mp3 of Weyoun’s “time to get packing” line. I’m pretty sure it was for a Bill but I can’t remember for sure. Was that you?
@Matt:
That’s me. ‘Time to start packing’ or when Sarek says explains why he married Amanda ‘At the time it seemed the logical thing to do’ are my candidates for the funniest ever ST lines. Time to start packing is heard every time I shut down my Windows 7 laptop.
I’m Bill who used to write at OTB Sports and twice contributed here at OTB. I also wrote at a popular conservative blog that’s still around and where my son’s story is told in greater detail.
Thanks again for getting me that sound file.
@CSK:
I have my own history of abuse in the Catholic Church and I can say that for many reasons we said nothing. For starters, at some level one believes it’s their own fault for, in the case of me and my classmates, being beaten, screamed at, ridiculed and other forms of emotional abuse on a daily basis from a Nun who literally hated children. By the end of my 2 year stint under her tutelage I had lost all vestiges of religious faith and had acquired a violence and an anger that I struggle to control to this very day. They finally sent her off to Colombia after she hit a girl with a fistful of keys requiring 80+ stitches to put her face back together.
My mother apologized to me decades later saying, “I knew something was wrong but had no idea, you had never complained all that much and then you just shut up.” Ma was a born and bred Southern Baptist who had converted when she married my father, so I believe she really did have no clue. The old man was on the road all the time and the last thing Ma would do when he got home from a trip was burden him with any familial troubles. I do not for a second believe the other teachers, the Principals and vice principals, the Pastor, etc etc had no idea. They knew. They could not not know. They all just pretended it wasn’t happening. It was easier that way.
@Michael Reynolds:
Your bigotry is duly noted. And Michael, you happen to know damned good and well how sensitive I would be to this issue.
By the way, I was not raised in a religious household nor have I ever belonged to a church. I hold no brief for the institution. I simply have the capacity to separate the issues rationally.
@Kylopod: My father had a young business associate with whom he was very close. With out warning, just a month before his impending marriage, he decided to join the priesthood (this was late 60s early 70s). Decades later I can now say he was undeniably gay. I suspect he joined the priesthood because he could no longer subject others to the hypocrisy that was the closet and that as a priest maybe he could pray the gay away. I doubt it worked. The priesthood has long been a false refuge for gays, pedophiles (please take note, those are 2 separate groups) and other social outcasts of faith.
@Guarneri:
No, you do not know how to separate issues rationally, because there is no separation. Anyone who belongs to and especially supports financially, an evil institution, is himself doing evil. If you give money to the KKK, guess what: you’re supporting racism. If you give money to the RC, guess what: you are supporting child rape.
I am sick of people insisting on special treatment because they really, really like their own magic invisible space friend. Being superstitious is not an excuse for supporting a global child rape conspiracy. There is no opt-out clause in basic morality. I don’t give a damn what people believe, I care about what they do, and what they do in this case is put money in the plate when this depraved and discredited institution tells them to pony up – money often used to pay off, silence or attack, their own victims. Who pays for that? All those people who are supposedly not to blame.
People are responsible for their actions. The action of supporting this institution, is evil.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I realize that. As I said before, for a variety of reasons I think the Church would be better off ending mandatory celibacy. What I was responding to was Modulo Myself’s assertion that letting priests marry would be “the solution to the issue.” That strikes me as not understanding the source of the problem, and seems to stem from the misconception that rape is a result of misdirected sexual energy. Allowing priests to marry might reduce the problem–and even that’s not clear–but if you think it’ll end it, you’re being willfully naive.
Catholic priests aren’t the only people to have sexually abused children. The list also includes clergy from other faiths, as well as teachers, camp counselors, babysitters, children’s relatives, even their own parents. The common denominator is that they are people placed in a position of trust over children, which is naturally where pedophiles who are intent on pursuing their urges will gravitate toward. The reason it’s worse in the Catholic Church is because the Catholic Church is literally one of the largest and most powerful institutions on Earth and therefore provides a level of protection not seen elsewhere. It is viewed by millions as an extension of God Himself, and as an organization you do not cross. Look at how activists like Bill Donohue scream bigotry at the slightest criticism of the Church. Look at how Guarneri reacted in this thread, and he’s reportedly not even a Catholic. The Church has become a haven for corruption because it’s such a mammoth entity with so little accountability where it’s easy to cover things up. Child sexual abuse in general–not just among Catholics–is a problem that has been ignored for generations because people have made a practice of looking the other way. The Catholic Church is practically designed to amplify that problem.
@Kylopod:
My take is that allowing priests to marry would bring in better people.
meh… People who seek authority are, by nature, probably not better people. Just like in business, people who seek management positions are generally least capable of being managers.
@Michael Reynolds:
So when can we expect your full throated denouncement of Hillary and the Democrats for fundraiser and abuser Harvey Weinstein? How about Bill? She of course knew everything.
How about the renouncement of the “creatives” you adore who all know how Hollywood works?
Maybe you can make good on that threat to move to New Zealand to escape the Dem Party and its band of rogues: “Carlos Danger,” Bill, Spitzer, Ellison and so on and so forth.
Spare me the faux outrage, Michael. You just saw a chance to take a cheap shot at the church and guilt by association of the church laity, and took it. If it makes a small man feel better about himself, who am I to argue?
@Guarneri:
If the Democratic Party, or any organization I associate with, conspired over the course of decades if not centuries to rape children, you’re damed right I’d criticize it, attack it, leave it, stop contributing to it. Your equivalency isn’t just phony, it’s quite frankly, sick.
@Modulo Myself: “My take is that allowing priests to marry would bring in better people.” You see the same abuse rates at public schools, day care, and everywhere else. Those places have a separate authority to get rid of abusers. That’s what the Catholic Church has needed.
@Guarneri: If we were looking for a textbook example of whataboutism, we couldn’t do better than your post here. There are two elements to what makes whataboutism a poor response. The first is that it’s based on a logical fallacy: even if all your criticisms of Hollywood and Democrats and Michael Reynolds were fair and well-taken, it wouldn’t constitute much of a defense of the Catholic Church.
But–and this point is equally important–your criticisms are not fair and well-taken. You lump together consensual extramarital affairs with criminal sexual assault. You lump together charges that have been proven with ones that remain unproven. You allege without evidence that Democratic donors knew about Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds at the time they held their fundraisers. You allege without evidence that Michael turns a blind eye to deplorable behavior committed by entertainers he admires, even though he’s expressed the exact opposite. Indeed, if you were at all familiar with Michael’s writings at OTB, you’d know he’s vigorously critical of many of his fellow “creatives” on the left.
That’s the true essence of whataboutism–it’s at bottom an attempt at deflection. You spend your time collecting your laundry list of complaints against Democrats–real and imagined, big and small–ready to blindly and thoughtlessly throw it at anyone who dares criticize things which you support, in a desperate attempt to discredit that person, but doing a bad job at even that.
@Leonard:
Every year I have to reregister my status as not a sex offender because my employment in the district is day to day. The reason that I have do send in these forms and have the background checks re run is because the legislature discovered that top administrators in school districts cover up the sexual offences of their staffs in order to avoid bringing shame upon the districts. The legislature decided to have me and others like me reregister each year because it was easier to do that than to correct the failings of highly paid administrator/mandatory reporters.
The fact that having me and a handful of others in each district reregister doesn’t correct the problem of administrators not reporting, you understand, but it may help to explain why “you see the same abuse rates at public schools, day care, and everywhere else.”
@Bill: @OzarkHillbilly:
Heartbreaking stories. Bill, I am so sorry for the terrible loss you and your wife suffered, and the additional pain inflicted on you..
@OzarkHillbilly:
Celibacy is abnormal. The catholic church made sexual abnormality a job requirement. And Surprise! they would up with thousands of employees who like touching the childrens.
@Bill: You’re welcome and it brings a smile to my face to know you’re still using it.