Article Title
Catholic Priests Abused 1,000 Children in Pennsylvania, Report Says
Link to Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/catholic-church-sex-abuse-pennsylvania.html
Link to Grand Jury Report: PA 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury Report 1 Interim Redacted __ 2018-08-14
Source: New York Times
Author(s): Laurie Goodstein and Sharon Otterman
Date: August 14, 2018
Synopsis of Article
Over 300 abusive priests, over a thousand identifiable victims abused while they were still minors (many of them young children), over 70 years of manipulating victims and their families to not report abuse and persuading civil authorities and law enforcement not to investigate it. That is the bottom line in the Pennsylvania grand jury report (40th Statewide Investigative Grand Jury, Report 1, Interim-Redacted) released in Harrisburg on August 14, 2018. The grand jury worked for two years to compile the evidence and write the report, which covers six of Pennsylvania’s eight Roman Catholic dioceses.
The report said there are likely thousands more victims whose records were lost or who were too afraid to come forward.
The instances of abuse cataloged in the report are horrific: “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 report’s criticism of the Catholic hierarchy is scathing:
“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.
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.
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 utter depravity documented in the report is shocking:
Mr. Shapiro was surrounded on Tuesday by about 20 abuse victims and their family members, who gasped and wept when he revealed that one priest had abused five sisters in the same family, including one girl beginning when she was 18 months old.
The New York Times article provides the following additional details:
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.”