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Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report of Investigation Into Child Abuse by the Catholic Church
enlightenedbum
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I'll start with the Times article summarizing some of the worst features.
Here is a link to the 1000+ page pdf of the full report. The "Appendix of Offenders" goes from page 315 to page 884, with each entry listing the name of the priest, employment history, and a summary of the offenses.
Trigger warnings for descriptions of child sexual abuse of all kinds:
The introduction:
The cover up:
On law enforcement looking the other way at the church's request:
Then there are lots and lots and really an endless stream of individual cases. I read the whole Sandusky indictment and listened to probably 80% of the victim impact statements in the Larry Nassar case. This document is much, much worse. It gets fairly graphic at times. Again, warning you. The parts I have excerpted from the introduction are relatively minor. It says the bulk of these cases were from the early 2000s.
Here's one more:
On the higher ups:
Recommendations:
First, remove the statute of limitations entirely for victims of child sexual abuse. A recent amendment gave people until the age of 50 to report, they have victims all the way up to age 83 they interviewed for this report.
Second, give people whose statute of limitations for civil suits ran out before they knew this was an institutional problem that opportunity with what they call a "civil window" law. Current law says you have 12 years after you turn 18 to sue, previously you had just two. For many of the victims, those two years expired before we knew about the widespread pattern of criminal sexual assault among the clergy, so they didn't know they had a case against the church. The grand jurors ask for those people to be given that opportunity back, again for two years from the enactment of the legislation.
Third, clarify the mandatory reporting laws. The phrasing now penalizes a continuing failure to report, but only if abuse of the child is "active." They want it clarified so that if there is any reason to believe the offender may continue the report is mandatory.
Fourth, require that NDAs say in plain language they do not apply to criminal cases. The Church was having victims sign them and it convinced them they had no legal recourse criminally or civilly.
They found over 300 offenders, mostly using the church's own documents, in addition to victim testimony, as well as the testimony of a dozen of the offenders themselves. They do not think they came anywhere close to identifying all of the offenders within their scope. They also didn't include every named priests, only the ones they felt they had significant evidence of abuse. Or the cases that did not involve minors. Because there were also instances with adult parishoners, drug use, financial crimes, etc.
This one I won't spoil:
In summary: BURN IT ALL DOWN
Here is a link to the 1000+ page pdf of the full report. The "Appendix of Offenders" goes from page 315 to page 884, with each entry listing the name of the priest, employment history, and a summary of the offenses.
Trigger warnings for descriptions of child sexual abuse of all kinds:
The introduction:
Introduction
We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have heard some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.
We were given the job of investigating child sex abuse in six dioceses - every diocese in the state except Philadelphia and Altoona -Johnstown, which were the subject of previous grand juries. These six dioceses account for 54 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties. We heard the testimony of dozens of witnesses concerning clergy sex abuse. We subpoenaed, and reviewed, half a million pages of internal diocesan documents. They contained credible allegations against over three
hundred predator priests. Over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church's own records. We believe that the real number - of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward - is in the thousands.
Most of the victims were boys; but there were girls too. Some were teens; many were prepubescent. Some were manipulated with alcohol or pornography. Some were made to masturbate their assailants, or were groped by them. Some were raped orally, some vaginally, some anally. But all of them were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all As a consequence of the coverup, almost every instance of abuse we found is too old to be prosecuted. But that is not to say there are no more predators. This grand jury has issued presentments against a priest in the Greensburg diocese and a priest in the Erie Diocese, who has been sexually assaulting children within the last decade. We learned of these abusers directly from their dioceses - which we hope is a sign that the church is finally changing its ways. And there may be more indictments in the future; investigation continues.
But we are not satisfied by the few charges we can bring, which represent only a tiny percentage of all the child abusers we saw. We are sick over all the crimes that will go unpunished and uncompensated. This report is our only recourse. We are going to name their names, and describe what they did - both the sex offenders and those who concealed them. We are going to shine a light on their conduct, because that is what the victims deserve. And we are going to make
our recommendations for how the laws should change so that maybe no one will have to conduct another inquiry like this one. We hereby exercise our historical and statutory right as grand jurors to inform the public of our findings.
This introduction will briefly describe the sections of the report that follow. We know it is very long. But the only way to fix these problems is to appreciate their scope.
The cover up:
The dioceses
This section of the report addresses each diocese individually, through two or more case studies that provide examples of the abuse that occurred and the manner in which diocesan leaders "managed" it. While each church district had its idiosyncrasies, the pattern was pretty much the
same. The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid "scandal." That is not our word, but theirs; it appears over and over again in the documents we recovered. Abuse complaints were kept locked up in a "secret archive." That is not our word, but theirs; the church's Code of Canon Law specifically requires the diocese to maintain such an archive. Only the bishop can have the key. The strategies were so common that they were susceptible to behavioral analysis by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. For our benefit, the FBI agreed to assign members of its National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime to review a significant portion of the evidence received.by the grand jury. Special agents testified before us that they had identified a series of practices that regularly appeared, in various configurations, in the diocesan files they had analyzed. It's like a playbook for concealing the truth:
First, make sure to use euphemisms rather than real words to describe the sexual assaults in diocese documents. Never say "rape"; say "inappropriate contact" or "boundary issues."
Second, don't conduct genuine investigations with properly trained personnel. Instead, assign fellow clergy members to ask inadequate questions and then make credibility determinations about the colleagues with whom they live and work.
Third, for an appearance of integrity, send priests for "evaluation" at church -run psychiatric treatment centers. Allow these experts to "diagnose" whether the priest was a pedophile, based largely on the priest's "self -reports," and regardless of whether the priest had actually engaged in sexual contact with a child.
Fourth, when a priest does have to be removed, don't say why. Tell his parishioners that he is on "sick leave," or suffering from "nervous exhaustion." Or say nothing at all.
Fifth, even if a priest is raping children, keep providing him housing and living expenses, although he may be using these resources to facilitate more sexual assaults.
Sixth, if a predator's conduct becomes known to the community, don't remove him from the priesthood to ensure that no more children will be victimized. Instead, transfer him to a new location where no one will know he is a child abuser.
Finally and above all, don't tell the police. Child sexual abuse, even short of actual penetration, is and has for all relevant times been a crime. But don't treat it that way; handle it like a personnel matter, "in house."
On law enforcement looking the other way at the church's request:
To be sure, we did come across some cases in which members of law enforcement, despite what may have been the dioceses' best efforts, learned of clergy sex abuse allegations. Some of these were many decades ago, and police or prosecutors at the time simply deferred to church officials. Other reports arose more recently, but involved old conduct, and so were quickly rejected on statute of limitations grounds without looking into larger patterns and potential continuing risks.
Then there are lots and lots and really an endless stream of individual cases. I read the whole Sandusky indictment and listened to probably 80% of the victim impact statements in the Larry Nassar case. This document is much, much worse. It gets fairly graphic at times. Again, warning you. The parts I have excerpted from the introduction are relatively minor. It says the bulk of these cases were from the early 2000s.
Here's one more:
On the higher ups:
What we can say though is that despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability. Priests were raping little boys and girls, and then men of God who were responsible for them did nothing; they hid it all. For decades. Monsignors, auxillary bishops, bishops, bishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted. Until that changes we think it is too early to close the book on the Catholic Church sex scandal.
Recommendations:
First, remove the statute of limitations entirely for victims of child sexual abuse. A recent amendment gave people until the age of 50 to report, they have victims all the way up to age 83 they interviewed for this report.
Second, give people whose statute of limitations for civil suits ran out before they knew this was an institutional problem that opportunity with what they call a "civil window" law. Current law says you have 12 years after you turn 18 to sue, previously you had just two. For many of the victims, those two years expired before we knew about the widespread pattern of criminal sexual assault among the clergy, so they didn't know they had a case against the church. The grand jurors ask for those people to be given that opportunity back, again for two years from the enactment of the legislation.
Third, clarify the mandatory reporting laws. The phrasing now penalizes a continuing failure to report, but only if abuse of the child is "active." They want it clarified so that if there is any reason to believe the offender may continue the report is mandatory.
Fourth, require that NDAs say in plain language they do not apply to criminal cases. The Church was having victims sign them and it convinced them they had no legal recourse criminally or civilly.
They found over 300 offenders, mostly using the church's own documents, in addition to victim testimony, as well as the testimony of a dozen of the offenders themselves. They do not think they came anywhere close to identifying all of the offenders within their scope. They also didn't include every named priests, only the ones they felt they had significant evidence of abuse. Or the cases that did not involve minors. Because there were also instances with adult parishoners, drug use, financial crimes, etc.
This one I won't spoil:
Yet another priest finally decided to quit after years of child abuse complaints, but asked for, and received, a letter of reference for his next job - at Walt Disney World.
In summary: BURN IT ALL DOWN
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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I'm not sure what there is to even say.
The two parts of the state not covered was already the subject of a similar investigation. Just in case you thought there was a gold watch at the bottom of this outhouse.
I was raised a Roman Catholic, was a wolf cub and altar boy. Luckily for me, I was never victimized, but I mostly attribute that to the fact that I was never comfortable being alone with an adult that wasn't one of my parents and thus never felt the desire to get "close" to any authority figure within my church.
Disclaimer aside, my gut reaction to this is straightforward, and, of course, completely impossible, but I need to give it voice somehow. The Catholic Church is a criminal organization. Demanding it be disbanded is, of course, impossible, but any church found to be complicit in these types of cover ups should unequivocally lose tax-exempt status at the very least.
One thing that needs to be stressed is that calling the Catholic Church a criminal organization is not an indictment of the Catholic faith, but of the organization that was built around that faith. This will be, of course, crazy difficult to do, but I believe there can be no other reaction by right-thinking people on this matter, society cannot abide by this kind of systematic abuse of children by a world-spanning organization. Clergy of any moral fiber at all should be abandonning their posts.
I may not be thinking straight at the moment but I am just so... so livid right now.
They had, at least 20 years earlier.
EDIT: Or the very next one, Michael Lawrence:
"Please help me. I sexually molested a young boy."
He was assigned to teach high school.
I luckily got over veneration of the organization by 8th grade because that's about when the Boston arch diocese, the one I grew up in, went through this with a few of its priests.
That, a detailed explanation of the church's conquest of Europe, and the tactics involved in it (which was my 8th grade religion curriculum at parochial school), and the near shunning of my family from our home parish when my parents got divorced led me to conclude the whole organization was a fallible and regularly corrupt organization that really as an organization shouldn't be trusted as moral authority.
I have no clue what to do or how to do it, but the situation is horrific.
Donald Trautman, the Bishop of Erie, was a god damn monster who blatantly covered up a number of these crimes.
At this point every person who keeps showing up on Sunday is complicit. This shit isn't a secret anymore.
In my opinion the church could turn on everyone that has been accused of abuse and those that protected them and it still wouldn't solve the problem. The church's core tenants of celibacy for the clergy and extremely limited leadership roles for women will eternally leave them with a staff highly populated with old weird men many of which will be prone responding to their animal instincts in a myriad of abusive manners.
Even though there was probably nothing wrong with any of them when they entered the seminary, they entered into an arrangement which absolutely breeds abuse. It's the same thing we saw with the Duggar family - kids who don't understand their feelings told those feelings are wrong and evil and are given no tools for dealing with them, left poorly supersived in a victim rich environment.
And from those documents it absolutely is a case of condoning it, in the sense of "we know it's happening, we have policies to address it, and the goal of those policies is to protect the assailant, even to the point of actively facilitating further abuse."
Between that and the Southern Baptist Convention's new "talking about sexual abuse in the church isn't Christlike" doctrine a couple of weeks ago, my cup of sympathy for major organized religions these days runneth not the tiniest bit over these days.
I have to wonder what the outcome is going to be in practice. Constitutionally the US would have trouble acting directly against the church as a whole, and I have a hard time believing Pennsylvania in particular could manage to round up the appalling percentage of guilty clergy even in the state, so.... ugh.
Rachael Denhollander is a lawyer, victims right activist, and Nassar survivor.
There's plenty of precedent for the U.S. government to take action against organized religious institutions. The issue is scale and bias toward established religions. Just take similar actions as we did against Warren Jeffs and his church, which was also prosecuted for widespread child abuse (among other crimes).
It's in really poor faith, for lack of a better term, to put some of the blame for this on your average Catholic church goer, who is very much not on the "let's abuse children" platform.
These abuse cases are bad enough as it is. Not everyone who watches sports is cheering on the Nassars and Sanduskies of the world either, let's be clear.
The basic problem is that the Catholic church in its history has wielded by far the most political power of any of the major denominations over the past few thousand years. It's very difficult for most people to uncouple that kind of power for the more pure principals of chastity, charity, and service to one's neighbors.
My parents generation had a major resistance to the idea, right around the time kids were being taught good touch/bad touch in school and started speaking out because they understood better what was happening, but all the older people I know took it as part of the deal, because what can you do? They're priests.
Many cases like this one turn up generations of victims. The Pennsylvania grand jury heard from witnesses as old as 82. That person was molested some seven Popes ago.
Sure but the church has also instituted a lot of changes over the last few centuries some for the better and others for the worst. Celibacy of the clergy was not always required and there's ample evidence to believe it had more to do with protecting the church's property and money than anything else.
No, but this shit is so bad and systemic the church needs to be stripped of all its protections and essentially eliminated from the US. I don't care that it's a religious organization, and I personally don't give a shit that people will be upset that a different sect does things like this instead of like that. The catholic church is an organized child rape syndicate. There is no fucking way to defend that.
There are simply put aspects of old school catholicism that attract very sick people .
I'm not insinuating that celibacy causes child sex abuse. What I'm saying is that insisting that it be a requirement of all clergy members and refusing to ordain women leaves you with a very limited subset of the general population.
It was a joke in the Middle Ages and cited as a charge against the Church during the Reformation and following religious wars. This is a case of an ancient and publicly distasteful tradition, passed down unofficially in seminaries, getting hit with modernity.
Even in this day and age, people were looking the other way,and attacking those who were trying to shed light on things. Remember this?
Yeah, the reason that O'Connor tore up a photo of John Paul II on live television was because of child abuse in the Church. And in response she had her character run through the mud and her career killed.
No, its not. The only reason these people have the power they do, power they have consistently used to abuse children and protect abusers are those who show up for services. This isn't a handful of rogue individuals, it is a system set up to enable and abet many many individuals.
They wrote to the Pope himself about one abuser and he did nothing. Root stem and branch, the RCC is a pedophile organization first, and everything else second.
Continuing to go is a declaration that the community or ritual of the service or whatever they find pleasing; is worth continuing to enable child sexual abuse.
They are the same type who protested Paterno getting fired. And the NCAA sanctions on Penn State.
So I'm still reeling from this report and feel strongly that I need to talk to my Catholic family about my feelings on this. Can we use this thread to discuss strategies on how to have constructive dialogue about this topic with religious family members? I'm fighting the urge to post a log rant on Facebook 'cause I feel that would do more harm than good, but I don't think I can remain quiet.
When dealing with Church leadership, everyone, rich or poor, gentile or Jew is held accountable to the same standard.
Jesus was pretty explicit in what he thought of those who hurt children.
Like many of the words of Jesus, it doesn't take a theologian to understand what he's saying here. There is no excuse for using the Church as a shield to protect oneself from criminal activity, especially against kids.
He's saying that followers need to abandon their doubts and become as guileless as children in their belief. Anyone who interferes with this process - such as causing someone to stumble by questioning their faith - would be better off committing suicide.
It'd be real easy to turn that around and say that parishioners need to have the blind devotion of children, and those questioning the Church are the better off dead whose efforts are causing the faithful to stumble in their devotion.
Religious hypocrisy was one of Jesus' biggest rage switches. That is the main thing I would keep in mind when discussing the Church's criminal failure on this issue. One who cloaks oneself in righteousness and then sins is WORSE than someone who is wholly unsaved.
The Church took the prescription against killing to mean that priests should burn people, since it was technically the fire that was killing them not the person who started it. If the entirety of human experience has shown anything, it's that the metaphor is a really shit way to make a theological point.
But the Catholic Church is criminal organization that preys on children, and now there is proof and needs dismantled, it's leaders belong in prison
My big hesitation about agreeing to this is that Catholic theology does have a history of genuinely supporting efforts to help the poor, and the retreat of the Church in an area in modern times has usually been followed not by a blossoming of humanism but a turn toward evangelical Christianity, which manages to combine the worst of the Catholic Church's teaching with a "the rich and powerful and the poor and miserable are that way because it reflects God's judgement" doctrine.
I don't think that what you are describing is a causal relationship.
It is in Latin America and Africa. You have Catholic and evangelical churches - the latter backed by big right wing American dollars - competing for members while lobbying for governments to suppress each other.
Humans have an amazing capacity to rationalize.l things.
While parables can be tricky, there is a lot of explicit "don't do this" in the gospels.
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Not trying to be facetious here, but do you have a link to a study that supports this claim, because my anectodal experience suggests that it's not quite that simple. Individuals of faith who are truly altruistic have no problem turning away from dogma and theology in support of a moral ideal, people of good faith know that it is deeds, not apperances, that must be valued. It is those who have authoritarian, egoistical bents that cloak themselves in ritual and defend pedophiles because they believe that by admitting fault in the institution they may be eroding their own power base and "moral superiority" as though that gives them the right to be shitheels. It is my belief that the "hardcore" evangelicals and catholics might, from time to time, pay lip service to charity to preserve a veneer of altruism, but (and this is especially true of the Prosperity school of evangelism), this is not sincere, and dismantling these institutions would do nothing to harm the activities of the truly charitable in our societies.
Religious institutions cloaking themselves in "but charity!" while installing a system in which they protect the worst people of all time are the worst kinds of hypocrites and do not get a pass because they do some good. There are plenty of charitable organisations out there who do good without the shit and they're not going anywhere and, in fact, would likely rise up to fill any void left by excising these pustules on the ballsack of society.