Catholic Church lobbying in Pa. spiked after damaging investigations

The Catholic Church has spent millions influencing Pennsylvania politics, but the funds perhaps have been the most useful amid reports uncovering widespread child sexual abuse and attempts to cover it up.

That money is again coming into play as two bills raising the statute of limitations on child sexual crimes and opening a two-year retroactive window for victims to file lawsuits once again head to the state Senate.

“(The expenditures) speak to the very issue of protecting their institutional reputation, which is one of the significant causes of this sex abuse crisis to begin with,” said Zach Hiner, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

There have been three grand jury investigations in the past decade that have revealed thousands of child sexual abuse cases by Pennsylvanian Catholic priests and attempts to hide them. All of them were welcomed by significant increases in spending on lobbying by the church.

The Pennsylvania Catholic Conference (PCC), the lobbying arm for the church in Pennsylvania, has spent $7.2 million in lobbying since 2007, according to state Department of State data.

Lobbying expenditures increased from $529,000 to $786,000 following the release of the 2011 Philadelphia grand jury report, the largest increase in the conference’s history and the most it ever spent in a year.

Beginning in 2016, expenditures  increased for three years in a row for the first time. That year, the state Attorney General’s six-diocese investigation began and a separate investigation into the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown concluded.